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Israel Through European Eyes

Every few months, Israel is publicly pilloried in the international media and on university campuses around the world for some alleged violation of human rights, real or imagined. Last month it was over an Israeli raid on a Turkish ship trying to run the blockade on Gaza, which left nine dead after the ship resisted seizure. A few months from now it will be over something else: Perhaps it will be over Israeli action against the Islamic terror state in Gaza, or against the Hizballah army in South Lebanon and its ever-growing mountain of missiles. Perhaps it will be over an Israeli strike on the Iranian or Syrian nuclear programs. Perhaps it will be over the destruction of an Iranian weapons ship at sea. Perhaps it will be over the revelation of an Israeli covert operation in an Arab country or in Europe or elsewhere. Perhaps it will be over an incident in an Israeli jail or at a roadblock in the West Bank. Perhaps it will be over the visit of an Israeli public figure to the Temple Mount, or the purchase and occupancy by Jews of a building in East Jerusalem. Perhaps it will be over something else.

But whatever the ostensible subject, and regardless of whether Israel’s political leaders and soldiers and spokesmen do their work as they should, we know for certain that the consequence of this future incident, a few months from now, will be another campaign of vilification in the media and on the campuses and in the corridors of power—a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis. We know we will again see our nation treated not as a democracy doing its duty to defend its people and its freedom, but as some kind of a scourge. We’ll again see everything that’s precious to us, and everything we consider just, trampled before our eyes. We’ll again have to experience the shame of having former friends turn their backs on us, and of seeing Jewish students running to dissociate themselves from Israel, even from Judaism, in a vain effort to retain the favor of disgusted peers. And we’ll again feel the bite of the rising anti-Semitic tide, returned after its post-World War II hiatus.

All this has happened repeatedly, and we know it will happen again. Indeed, these outbursts have grown more vicious and effective with each passing year for a generation now. And there’s every reason to think this humiliating trend will continue, with next year worse than this one.

As to the reactions of Jews and other friends of Israel to these smear campaigns—as far as I can tell, the reactions haven’t really changed in the last generation either: My friends on the political left always seem to think that a change of Israeli policy could prevent these campaigns of vilification, or at least lessen their reach. My friends on the political right always seem to say that what we need is “better PR”.

No doubt, Israel could always stand to have better policies and better public relations. But my own view is that neither of these otherwise sensible reactions can help improve things, because neither really gets to the heart of what’s been happening to Israel’s legitimacy. Israel’s policies have fluctuated radically over the past 30 or 40 years, being sometimes better, sometimes worse. And the adroitness with which Israel presents its case in the media and through diplomatic channels has, likewise, been sometimes better, sometimes worse. Yet the international efforts to smear Israel, to corner Israel, to delegitimize Israel and drive it from the family of nations, have proceeded and advanced and grown ever more potent despite the many upturns and downturns in Israeli policy and Israeli PR.

Nothing could make this more evident than the Jewish withdrawal from Gaza and the subsequent establishment there of an independent and belligerent Islamic republic 40 miles from downtown Tel Aviv. Israelis and friends of Israel can reasonably be divided on the question of whether this withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, or the parallel withdrawal from the security zone in South Lebanon in 2000, was really in Israel’s interests, and whether the Jewish state is today better off because of them. But one thing about which we can all agree, I think, is that these withdrawals did nothing to stem the tide of hatred and vilification being poured on Israel’s head internationally. Whatever it is that is driving the trend toward the progressive delegitimization of Israel, it is a trend operating more or less without reference to any particular Israeli policy on any given issue.

To put this in slightly different terms, it’s not the maintenance of a security zone in South Lebanon, or Israeli control of the Gaza Strip, or a raid on a Turkish blockade runner’s boat that is responsible for what is happening to Israel’s position on the world stage. These specific instances of Israeli policy are, for our opponents, nothing but symbols of something deeper and more hateful that they see revealed time and again when they look upon the state of Israel and its deeds. And until we understand what this deeper issue with Israel is, I believe we’ll remain powerless to understand the progressive growth of the hatred toward us—and powerless to fight it.

The rest of this letter will be devoted to trying to get at what that underlying objection to Israel is. This won’t be your usual op-ed piece on the subject because I don’t think the answers we want are accessible by looking at surface phenomena. I think we have to go much deeper. After I try to do that, I’ll say a few words about what I see as the only possible course of action if we are interested in ultimately reversing this trend.

II.

In 1962, a Berkeley professor named Thomas Kuhn published a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which went on to become the most influential academic book of the last half century, selling over a million copies in a dozen languages. Kuhn’s book dropped a depth charge under the foundations of academic thinking about the way we search for truth, and about the way we come to believe the things we believe. And although the subject of the book is the way the search for truth works in the physical sciences, it has implications well beyond the sciences.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argues that the traditional picture of science—in which scientists conduct universally replicable experiments to accumulate verified facts, which together make up the body of scientific truths—is without basis in the actual history of science. Instead, scientists are trained to see the world in terms of a certain framework of interrelated concepts, which Kuhn calls a paradigm. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the paradigm not only determines the interpretation that a scientist gives the facts, but even what facts there are to be interpreted: The “facts” that scientists consider admissible for discussion are those that easily conform to the dominant paradigm, or that can be made to conform to it by extending the paradigm or introducing minor repairs into it. Those facts that can’t be made to conform to the reigning paradigm are overlooked entirely or dismissed as unimportant.

Kuhn was famous, of course, for pointing out that things don’t go on like this forever. The history of science is punctuated by shifts in the dominant paradigm, as when Aristotelian physics gave way to Newtonian physics, or when Newton’s science was displaced by Einstein’s. Kuhn calls these shifts in paradigm scientific revolutions, and in the book he discusses tens of such shifts from the history of the physical sciences. Kuhn concludes that while most scientists are reasonable people, what we would usually consider reasonable discussion and argument only takes place among scientists who subscribe to the same paradigm. Nothing like a normal process of persuasion is involved in battles between competing paradigms. Indeed, when scientists representing competing paradigms argue, there is often no way at all that either one will be able to prove his case to the other:

The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case…. [Thus while] each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing…, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.[1]

As Kuhn points out, even a mountain of facts will not change the mind of a scientist who has been trained in a different paradigm, because the fundamental framework from which he views the world is different: The facts themselves mean something completely different to him. In fact, very few scientific paradigms, including the most famous and most successful, are able to provide the kind of decisive experimental evidence that can force scientists to give up the old paradigm.

How, then, do scientists come to change their minds? Kuhn says that in many cases, they never change their minds—and that an entire generation has to pass before the scientific community enters a new paradigm:

How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? Part of the answer is that they are very often not. Copernicanism made very few converts for almost a century after Copernicus’ death. Newton’s work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on…. And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [2]

Kuhn doesn’t go quite as far as endorsing Planck’s claim that paradigms change only when the supporters of the old paradigm die off and a younger generation takes their place. But he comes close, approvingly quoting a passage from The Origin of Species in which Darwin suggests that even the most brilliant scientists will likely be unable to adjust to his theory of natural selection. The prejudices run too deep, Darwin writes, and it will take new generation of scientists to be able to consider the new theory fairly. As he writes:

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite mine…. [B]ut I look with confidence to the future—to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.[3]

III.

Kuhn’s ideas have had an immense impact on the way the scientific enterprise is understood in the universities. And since most academic disciplines see themselves as “sciences,” few have escaped revision in light of Kuhn’s way of thinking about science. This has been true, for example, in the field of international relations, in which studies applying Kuhn’s ideas have concluded that nations are likewise perceived from within a fixed conceptual framework or paradigm, and that their actions, regardless of how carefully crafted, usually do little more than reinforce pre-existing expectations.[4] The implications of this kind of rethinking for academic research and teaching are vast, and are still unfolding even now.

But as far as I can tell, the revolution in the way scholars think about facts, arguments, and truth has not yet had the slightest impact on the manner in which Jews and friends of Israel think about the progressive delegitimization of the Jewish state in the international arena. Indeed, most of the concerned individuals I speak with are still convinced that if only certain facts were better known–or better presented–Israel’s circumstances could be improved dramatically.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is right. Media battles such as the one over the Turkish ship off Gaza are necessary for Israel’s short-term defense, and we had better do our best to win them by presenting the facts as best we are able. But I think that Kuhn’s argument makes it clear that the outcomes of these contests won’t have any real impact on the overall trajectory of Israel’s standing among educated people in the West. This standing has been deteriorating for the past generation, not because of this or that set of facts, but because the paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has shifted. We’ve been watching the transition from one paradigm to another on everything having to do with Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation. So long as we don’t understand this well, we won’t really understand what’s going on, and we won’t be able to do anything to really improve things.

What’s the old paradigm? And what’s the new one to which the international arena is shifting?

Let’s begin with the old paradigm, which is the one that granted Israel its legitimacy in the first place. The modern state of Israel was founded, both constitutionally and in terms of the understanding of the international community, as a nation-state, the state of the Jewish people. This is to say that it is the offspring of an early modern movement that understood the freedom of peoples as depending on a right to self-protection against the predations of international empires speaking in the name of a presumed higher authority.[5] And while there have always been nation-states—the Jewish kingdom of the Bible was the most important classical example[6]—the modern history of the national state focuses on the rise of nation-states such as England and the Netherlands, and subsequently Richelieu’s France, whose self-understanding as sovereign nations was sharpened and consolidated during the long struggle to liberate their peoples from the pretensions to universal empire of the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs (that is, the “Holy Roman Empire”) beginning in the mid-1500s. What made the defeat of the Spanish “Armada” by Elizabeth in 1588 a turning point in mankind’s history was precisely the fact that in turning away Phillip II’s bid to rule England, she also made solid the freedom (or “self-determination”) of peoples from the Austro-Spanish claim to a right to rule mankind as sole protector of the universal Catholic faith.

The defeat of the universalist ideal in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 led to the establishment of a new paradigm for European politics—one in which a revitalized concept of the national state held the key to the freedom of peoples throughout Europe. By the late-1800s, this idea of national liberty had been extended to the point that it was conceived not only as a governing principle for Europe, but for the entire world. Progressives such as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson championed the sovereign nation-state, which would have the right to defend its form of government, laws, religion and language against the tyranny of imperial actors, as the cornerstone of what was ultimately to be a new political order for humanity. Herzl’s Zionist Organization, which proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish people, fit right into this political understanding—and indeed, it was under British sponsorship that the idea of the Jewish state grew to fruition. In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third World.

But the idea of the nation-state has not flourished in the period since the establishment of Israel. On the contrary, it has pretty much collapsed. With the drive toward European Union, the nations of Europe have established a new paradigm in which the sovereign nation-state is no longer seen as holding the key to the well-being of humanity. On the contrary, the independent nation-state is now seen by many intellectuals and political figures in Europe as a source of incalculable evil, while the multinational empire—the form of government which John Stuart Mill had singled out as the very epitome of despotism—is now being mentioned time and again with fondness as a model for a post-national humanity.[7] Moreover, this new paradigm is aggressively advancing into mainstream political discourse in other nations as well—even in countries such as the United States and Israel.

Why is this happening? How is it that so many French, Germans, English, Dutch and others are now willing to lend a hand in dismantling the states in which they live, and to exchanging them for the rule of an international regime?

To answer these questions, we have to take a brief look at the source of the modern post-national paradigm in European thought. This alternative way of viewing European politics was launched in a 1795 manifesto by Immanuel Kant calledPerpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. In it, Kant issued a famous and explicit attack on the ideal of the nation-state, comparing national self-determination to the lawless freedom of savages, which, he said, is rightly detested as “barbarism,” and a “brutish debasement of humanity.” As he wrote:

We look with profound contempt upon the way in which savages cling to their lawless freedom. They would rather engage in incessant strife than to submit to legal constraint…. We regard this as barbarism, coarseness, and brutish debasement of humanity. We might thus expect civilized peoples, each united within itself as a [nation] state, would hasten to abandon so degrading a condition as soon as possible. But instead of doing so, each state sees its own majesty… precisely in not having to submit to any external constraint, and the glory of its ruler consists in his power to order thousands of people to immolate themselves….

For Kant, then, the hallmark of reason in politics is the willingness to give up any kind of right to act on the basis of one’s own political independence. This is true of the individual, when he submits to the lawful order of the political state. And it is true of nations as well, which must in the same way give up any right to independent action and enter into an “international state” that will assume all rights respecting the use of force and the establishment of justice:

There is only one rational way in which states co-existing with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare…. They must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state, which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the people of the earth.[8]

In Perpetual Peace, then, Kant argues that the establishment of a universal state, which will “grow until it embraced all the people of the earth,” is the only possible dictate of reason. Human beings who do not agree to the subordination of their national interests to the decisions of such a universal state are seen as opposing the historical march of humanity toward reason. The supporters of the nation-state are seen as supporting a violent egoism on an international scale, which is as much an abdication of morals as the insistence of violent egoism in our personal lives.

For many years, the Kantian paradigm, which imputed an intrinsic immorality to the institution of the national state, found few takers in Europe. In the 19th century, it was embraced by a minuscule number of Communists and utopians, and a handful of Catholic reactionaries. But the 20th century was a different story. The Soviets and Marxists blamed the carnage of the two world wars on the order of nation-states. This was an argument that had little traction in the European mainstream between the wars. But after World War II, when Nazism was added to the list of crimes attributed to the nation-state, the result was very different. Nazism was seen as the rotten fruit of the German nation-state, and Kant looked to have been right all along: For the nations to arm themselves, and to determine for themselves when to use these arms, was now seen as barbarism and a brutish debasement of humanity.

For the record, my own view is that this line of argument is preposterous. The heart of the idea of the nation-state is the political self-determination of peoples. The nation-state is a form of government that limits its political aspirations to the rule of one nation, and to establishing national freedom for this nation. The Nazi state, on the other hand, was precisely the opposite of this: Hitler opposed the idea of the nation-state as an expression of Western effeteness. On his view, the political fate of all nations should be determined by the new German empire that was to arise: Indeed, Hitler saw his Third Reich as an improved incarnation of what he referred to as the First Reich—which was none other than the Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs! The Nazis’ aim was thus diametrically opposed to that of the Western nation-states. Hitler’s dream was precisely to build his empire on their ruin.

Obvious as this seems to me, many Europeans declined to see things this way, accepting the view that Nazism was, more or less, the nation-state taken to its ugly conclusion. In this way, the Soviets’ condemnation of the Western nation-state was joined by a new Western anti-nationalism, which eagerly sought an end to the old order in the name of Kant’s march of reason. As the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, perhaps the leading theoretician of a post-national Europe, pointed out, this transition was particularly easy for Germans—given Germany’s role in World War II and the fact that post-war Germany was in any case under occupation and was no longer a sovereign state.[9] He might have added that unlike the British, French and Dutch, the German-speaking peoples of Europe had historically never lived under a single sovereignty, so that the dream of the nation-state was perhaps in any case somewhat less important to them.

Be this as it may, this post-national vision found takers all over Europe. A mere generation later, in 1992, European leaders signed the Treaty of Maastricht establishing the European Union as an international government, and stripping member states of many of the powers associated historically with national independence. Of course, there are many in Europe who have not yet accepted this course. And it’s still unclear what the future holds—whether the nation states of Europe will succeed in retaining aspects of their sovereignty, or whether these states, as independent nations, will soon be a mere memory.

But either way, the impact of the new paradigm, which is the engine driving the movement toward European Union, has already been overwhelming. Both in Europe and in North America, we are watching the growth of a generation of young people that, for the first time in 350 years, does not recognize the nation-state as the foundation of our freedoms. Indeed, there is a powerful new paradigm abroad, which sees us doing without such states. And it has unleashed a tidal wave of consequences, for those who embrace it and for those who do not.

IV.

I have to admit I’m deeply troubled by the prospect that a nation such as Britain, which has so often been a light to others in politics, philosophy, and science, should some day soon step down from the stage of world history forever. And the same may be said of Holland, France, and others. But my focus in this letter is the Jews and our own state, and I’d like now to try and understand what Israel looks like when seen through European eyes—or rather, through the eyes of the new paradigm that provides the framework for understanding Israel to so many in Europe, and now also to increasing numbers of educated people in America and elsewhere.

Consider the Auschwitz concentration camp. For most Jews, Auschwitz has a very particular meaning: It was not Herzl’s Zionist Organization that succeeded in persuading nearly all Jews the world over that there could be no other way but to establish a sovereign Jewish state. It was Auschwitz and the destruction of the six million at the hands of the Germans and their sympathizers that did this. From the horror and humiliation of Auschwitz, this inescapable lesson emerged: That it was Jewish dependence on the military protection of others that had brought this about. This message was already articulated with perfect clarity by David Ben-Gurion in the National Assembly of the Jews of Palestine in November 1942:

We do not know exactly what goes on in the Nazi valley of death, or how many Jews have already been slaughtered… We do not know whether the victory of democracy and freedom and justice will not find Europe a vast Jewish cemetery in which the bones of our people are scattered…. We are the only people in the world whose blood, as a nation, is allowed to be shed.… Only our children, our women… and our aged are set apart for special treatment, to be buried alive in graves dug by them, to be cremated in crematoriums, to be strangled and to be murdered by machine guns… for but one sin:… Because the Jews have no political standing, no Jewish army, no Jewish independence, and no homeland…. Give us the right to fight and die as Jews.… We demand the right… to a homeland and independence. What has happened to us in Poland, what God forbid, will happen to us in the future, all our innocent victims, all the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions… are the sacrifices of a people without a homeland…. We demand… a homeland and independence….[10]

In these words, the tie between the Holocaust and what Ben-Gurion calls the “sin” of Jewish powerlessness is powerfully in evidence. The meaning of Auschwitz is that the Jews failed in their efforts find a way to defend their children. They depended on others, decent men in power in America or Britain, who, when the time came, did virtually nothing to save European Jewry. Today, most Jews continue to believe that the only thing that has really changed since those millions of our people perished—the only thing that stands as a bulwark against the repetition of this chapter in the world’s history—is Israel.[11]

It is a little-discussed fact that the Jews are not the only ones for whom Auschwitz has become an important political symbol. Many Europeans, too, see Auschwitz as being at the heart of the lesson of World War II. But the conclusions they draw are precisely the opposite of those drawn by Jews. Following Kant, they see Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of that barbarism, that brutal debasement of humanity, which is national particularism. On this view, the death camps provide the ultimate proof of the evil that results from permitting nations to decide for themselves how to dispose of the military power in their possession. The obvious conclusion is that it was wrong to give the German nation this power of life and death. If such evil is to be prevented from happening again and again, the answer must be in the dismantling of Germany and the other national states of Europe, and the yoking together of all the European peoples under a single international government. Eliminate the national state once and for all—Ecrasez l’infame!—and you have sealed off that dark road to Auschwitz.

Notice that according to this view, it is not Israel that is the answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union: A united Europe will make it impossible for Germany, or any other European nation, to rise up and persecute others once again. In this sense, it is European Union that stands as the guarantor of the future peace of the Jews, and indeed, of all humanity.

So here you have two competing paradigms concerning the meaning of Auschwitz. In a sense, they’re each looking at the same facts: Both paradigms take it as a given that millions were murdered in Auschwitz by the Germans and their collaborators, that the deeds done there were utterly evil, and that Jews and others who died there were the helpless victims of this evil. But at this point, agreement ends. From here, precisely as Kuhn suggests, individuals looking at the same facts through different paradigms see utterly different things:

Paradigm A: Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of Jewish women and men standing empty-handed and naked, watching their children die for want of a rifle with which to protect them.

Paradigm B: Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of German soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own government’s views as to their national rights and interests.

It’s important to see that these two views, which at first don’t even seem to be talking about the same thing, are actually describing points of view that are almost perfectly irreconcilable. In the one, it’s the agency of the murderers that is seen as the source of the evil; in the other, the powerlessness of the victims—a seemingly subtle difference in perspective that opens up into a chasm when we turn these competing paradigms in another direction and look at Israel through their eyes.

Here are the same two paradigms, now with their attention turned to Israel and what it represents:

Paradigm A: Israel represents Jewish women and men standing rifle in hand, watching over their own children and all other Jewish children and protecting them. Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.

Paradigm B: Israel represents the unspeakable horror of Jewish soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own government’s views as to their national rights and interests. Israel is Auschwitz.

In both paradigms, the fact of Israel takes on an extraordinary significance because of the identity of the Jews as the victims of the Shoah. For Israel’s founders, the fact that the survivors of the death camps and their children could be given weapons and permitted to train as soldiers under a Jewish flag seemed a decisive movement of the world toward what was just and right. It could in no sense make up for what had happened. But it was just nonetheless, granting the survivors precisely that empowerment that, had it come a few years earlier, would have saved their loved ones from death and worse. In this sense, Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz. But Israel takes on extraordinary significance in the new European paradigm as well. For in Israel, the survivors and their children took up arms and set themselves on a course of determining their own fate. That is, this people, so close to the Kantian ideal of perfect self-renunciation only a few decades ago, have instead chosen what is now seen as the path of Hitler—the path of national self-determination. It is this which lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel towards Israel, and especially toward anything having to do with Israel’s attempts to defend itself, regardless of whether these operations are successful or unsuccessful, irreproachable or morally flawed. For in taking up arms in the name of their own national state and their own self determination, the Jews, as many Europeans and others now see it, have simply taken up the same evil that led Germany to build the camps. The details may differ, but the principle, in their eyes, is the same: Israel is Auschwitz.

Try to see this through European eyes: Try imagining being a proud Dutchman, whose nation was the first to light the torch of liberty in that hopeless uprising against Catholic Spain in a war of independence that lasted eighty years. “Yet I am willing to give this up,” he says to himself, “to sacrifice this heritage with its dreams of past glory, and to say goodbye to the country of my forefathers, for the sake of something higher: I will make this painful sacrifice for the sake of an international political union that will ultimately embrace all humanity. Yes, I will do it for humanity.” Yet who is it who stands against him? Who, among the civilized peoples, would dare turn their backs on this effort, blessed by morality and reason, to attain at last the salvation of mankind? Imagine his shock: “The Jews! Those Jews, who should have been the first to welcome the coming of the new order, the first to welcome the coming of mankind’s salvation, instead establish themselves as its opponents, building up their own selfish little state, at war with the world. How dare they? Must they not make the same sacrifices as I in the name of reason and good? Are they so debased they cannot remember their own parents in Auschwitz? No, they cannot remember—for they’ve been seduced and perverted by the same evil that had previously seized our neighbors in Germany. They have gone over to the side of Auschwitz.”

Thus it is not just by some fluke that we constantly hear Israel and its soldiers (by which we mean the sons and daughters of most of the Jewish families in Israel) constantly being compared to the Nazis. We aren’t talking about just any old smear, chosen arbitrarily or for its rhetorical value alone. In Europe and wherever else the new paradigm has spread, the comparison with Nazism, sickening and absurd though it may be, is as natural and inevitable as mud after rain.

And this, I think, gives us the answer to the question with which we started. We want to know how it can be that at some very fundamental level, the facts don’t seem to matter any more: How it can be that even where Israel is undoubtedly in the right—not to mention the inevitable cases in which Israeli leaders or soldiers have performed poorly—the country can be pilloried in campaigns of vilification that bite deeper and hit harder with every passing year. How it can be that after the destruction of the Israeli security zone in South Lebanon, and after Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the hatred of Israel only grows more full-throated? The answer is that while hatred for Israel may, at a given moment, be focused quite sincerely on certain facts about the security zone or the Gaza Strip or the Turkish blockade runners, the trajectory of international disgust or hatred for Israel is just not driven by any of these facts. It is driven by the rapid advance of a new paradigm that understands Israel, and especially the independent Israeli use of force to defend itself, as illegitimate down to its foundations. If you believe that Israel is, in some important sense, a variant on Nazism, then you just aren’t going to be very impressed by “improvements” in Israeli policies or PR. An improved Auschwitz is still Auschwitz.

Perhaps you are asking yourself the following: If this is right, and the comparison between Israel and the most odious political movement in European history is hard-wired into the new paradigm of international politics that is quickly advancing upon us, then isn’t it the case that people who subscribe to this paradigm are going to be coming to the conclusion that Israel has no right to exist and should be dismantled?

To which I say: Of course this comparison leads to the conclusion that Israel has no right to exist and should be dismantled. And why not? If Germany and France have no right to exist as independent states, why should Israel? And if everyone is prepared to remain dry-eyed on the day the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are finally gone, why should anyone feel differently about Israel? On the contrary, while Jews and their friends continue to speak in dread of “Israel’s destruction,” this phrase is no longer feared among new-paradigmers of various stripes—some of whom are already permitting themselves to fantasize in public about political arrangements that will permit the Jewish state to cease to exist.[12]

V.

Israel continues to be threatened militarily, first and foremost by Iran. But if Israel falls, it will not be by way of Iranian missiles. It will be by way of words, as the Soviet Union fell. Jews and non-Jews will simply cease to understand why such a state should exist—and then one day, with awesome speed, the independent Jewish state will be no more.

Those who are concerned to defend Israel on the battlefield are well aware that this involves a never-ending reassessment of the sources of danger and the means needed to meet new threats as they arise. On the battlefield of ideas, the state of Israel is today in danger as never before. But the danger isn’t coming from Israel’s traditional enemies and it can’t be fought using the traditional means. You can’t fight a paradigm with facts—because pretty much any facts you’ve got are either dismissed as irrelevant or absorbed into the new paradigm and reinterpreted in a way that only reinforces it. You can only fight a paradigm with a competing paradigm. And the paradigm that gave birth to Israel and which held it firm, both domestically and internationally, is today in tatters.

What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in college. If you’re used to academic books, it’s an easy read. And if not, it’s a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a clearer insight into what’s happening to Israel today in the international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in Israel’s universities.

After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed. There’s much to be said about this, and it’s not for now. But I’ll leave you with just this thought as a start on it: Paradigm shifts aren’t like an election campaign or a struggle over some aspect of policy, much less a short-term media battle like the one over the Turkish flotilla, which can be resolved one way or another in matter of weeks or months, if not days. Paradigm shifts are unusual in the lives of individuals. And when they happen, they often take years to work themselves out. For this reason, clashes between political paradigms tend to play themselves out over a generation or more. By the same token, the relevant media in which these clashes are played out aren’t the newspapers or television or the internet. By the time we’re reading the newspapers or watching CNN, we’ve already got our paradigm in place—just like the reporters we’re watching, who just keep reporting from within their own set paradigm, over and over again. When it comes to shifts of political paradigm, these take place principally through books, which expose people to an idea at length and in depth; and in schools, where such books are studied and discussed, especially universities. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the paradigm that has served as the foundation for Israel’s existence, that’s where the work is going to have to be done.

Notes

[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1962]), p. 148. [2] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 150-151. The quote is from Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, F. Gaynor, trans. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968 [1949]), pp. 33-34. [3] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York, 1889), vol. II, pp. 295-296. Quoted in Kuhn, p. 151. [4] An early study that successfully applied Kuhn’s ideas to the international arena is Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton, 1976). [5] For a more extensive discussion of the nation-state as a means of freeing mankind from empire, see my essay, “Empire and Anarchy,” which is the first of my trilogy of essays on the nation-state. Yoram Hazony, “On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy,” Azure 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 27-70. [6] On the Jewish state of antiquity as a national states, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge, 1997); Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2002); Yoram Hazony, “On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy,” Azure 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 34-35, 39; Daniel Gordis, “The Tower of Babel and the Birth of Nationhood,” Azure 40 (Spring 2010). [7] See, for example, Jurgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” Ciarin Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds., The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), pp. 117-119, 160-161; Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton, 1993), pp. 151f, 170 n. 7. One scholar who recognized that these beliefs are leading to the reemergence of the Hapsburg empire as the institutional structure of Europe is Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, pp. 121-122, 200. [8] Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Hans Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, trans., Kant’s Political Writings(Cambridge: Cambridge, 1970), pp. 102-105. [9] Jurgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” p. 118. [10] Speech by Ben-Gurion before a special session of the National Assembly, November 30, 1942. Central Zionist Archives, J/1366. [11] For discussion of Israel’s role as the guardian of the Jewish people, see Yoram Hazony, “On the National State, Part 2: The Guardian of the Jews,” Azure 13 (Summer 2003), pp. 133-165. [12] See, for example, Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003. An impressive Zionist response is Leon Wieseltier “Israel, Palestine, and the Return of the Bi-National Fantasy: What is Not to be Done,” The New Republic, October 27, 2003.

163 Responses to "Israel Through European Eyes"

Andrew Ingram

December 16, 2011

N/A

Rubbish. I've just wasted half an hour of my time.

Mori Glaser

July 20, 2011

N/A

When I was a feminist peace activist in the UK in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, we used exactly this model - Kuhn’s paradigm - to analyze the self-justification of patriarchal thinking, especially the nuclear approach to diplomacy, which we saw as an extreme version of the patriarchal paradigm. Our own paradigm was that in the UK we were caught in the middle of the Cold War, with US nuclear military bases all over the country strategically placed to draw Soviet fire to us.

As you point out, the Cold War didn’t end with a nuclear war - or with a victory for the words of the peace movement (the two win–lose options we recognized then). The Cold War ended with something that neither paradigm took into account: internal processes in the Soviet Union that took place through words.

I certainly agree that the way Israel is viewed by the rest of the world is based on the paradigms of others and not on what we do.At the same time, Israel acts within its own paradigm(s), playing its part in the game of competing paradigms and ensuring the perpetuation of the whole process just as surely as the US and the USSR perpetuated the Cold War.

We seem to need paradigms to make sense of the world - the problem lies in the way we then defend them to the death (preferably other people’s death but maybe even our own) because we feel as if it is the paradigm itself that makes us safe. Yet if we were really secure in our own paradigm, we Israelis wouldn’t need to be so defensive and super-sensitive, no matter who said what about us!

The way out of the paradigm trap that I see is dialogue between like minded people with different views (not a contradiction in terms in my experience) which distorts and displaces the paradigms which we set up as comfort zones for ourselves. They then become capable of developing and evolving into more inclusive paradigms (which may prove to be no less of a comfort zone, given how uncomfortable we actually feel most of the time!) The introduction of new points of view from elsewhere / from others means that we feel less obsessively invested in every aspect of our paradigm, and reduces our impulse to maintain its original boundaries by constantly defending its right to exist as such and in its entirety.

Our paradigms need the addition of the dimension of time to make them fluid and capable of development. The process of Evolution didn’t stop the moment Darwin defined his paradigm for the entire natural world, so why should Zionism? Evolution is an example of an open-minded paradigm whose structure is not threatened by the introduction of new information. It gives us a framework to understand the world now as well as the opportunity to continue with the same paradigm as our knowledge expands. Thus we maintain continuity and a safe space without the necessity to prioritize defending our paradigm at any given moment.

I see many Israelis working on reconstructing their part of our national paradigm without giving it that name. Much of this is sectarian and wastes energy on trying to defeat other paradigms. However, many Israelis do enter into dialogue with each other and with Palestinians and with anyone else we can find who is interested in talking to us. We feel a need to move on from this intolerable place of transition that is looking so permanent. We actively want change – which has to involve breaking down the national paradigms that are imposed on us by our elected leaders, whose personal interests diverge so widely from ours.

To reconstruct the national paradigm, we need to look for the common ground between sectional Israeli paradigms and give it priority, whatever it is – because that is what will take us forward, just as surely as we are held back by insisting on the ideological priorities that have driven our conflicting paradigms thus far.

Regarding Europe, I don’t see the large nation-states of the EU stepping down from the world stage – each has kept major national characteristics, eg the UK balked at giving up the pound, and Brits didn’t voice regrets even when the value of the Euro overtook the pound and they tangibly lost money as a result of their decision. Global business interests are colonizing many of the prerogatives of national governments, but that’s another discussion.

The small new nation-states of Europe, some of which have joined the EU, look to me like examples of John Stuart Mills’ nation-states; others such as Scotland are in process of emerging. The notion of the small nation-state is validated within the EU by the acceptance of these new states as members. A confident nation-state (such as a state in a secure location within Europe, whose enemies have fallen) can take the risk of union without the existential fear that it will disappear.

Therefore I don’t agree with your paradigm that the existence of the nation-state (and thus of Israel) is necessarily placed in jeopardy by European unity. I think the source of anti-Israeli paradigms is more amorphous and more deeply rooted in history, geography, social psychology and probably every other science known to us.

So how can we maintain our age-old Jewish tradition of survival until, if ever, the dominant world paradigm shifts and Israel is no longer under threat?

I see the next step as salvaging and developing our identity as Israelis by recognizing / re-conceptualizing our national paradigm as the interactive mosaic of our daily life as a nation, in which Israelis live together in harmony and in conflict, with joy and bickering and shared fear and pain.

In relation to the rest of the world, our constant demands that our humanity and our point of view be recognized are falling on deaf ears. Here we have the opportunity to re-conceptualize and reconstruct the dialogue from our side - since no one is coming towards us and expressing willingness to change their approach.

I also see Israel as the opposite of Auschwitz in a very specific sense: we know that Auschwitz was not our fault. Now that we are no longer powerless, we need to make sure that the words – the education and the dialogue - that will determine the next major phase in the history of Israel and of the Jewish people are our achievement.

Few of us are expecting a second Holocaust, but it looks as though the coming years are likely to offer us no less of a challenge than emigrating to America from the Shtetl.

Jack Golbert

July 17, 2011

N/A

Is this an accurate depiction of political thought in Europe? It is ironically myopic and historically ignorant to expect the Jewish people to be "the first to welcome the coming of the new order, the first to welcome the coming of mankind’s salvation" in the form of a universal political union of all the peoples of the world. Didn't Jews embrace Communism in Russia for exactly that reason? And were the Jews of the Soviet Union smothered with equality and camaraderie and acceptance into the fullness of Marxist humanism? Of course they were not. Jews fled from the horrors of Soviet Jew-hatred toward the Germans, viewing the Jews fleeing the Germans toward the Soviet Union as madmen, and vice versa, of course. We have seen "universal humanism" for what it really is. It very frequently turns out that what applies to "everyone" does not apply to the Jews.

If the aversion to national peculiarism were the motivating animus, because national egoism causes wars and hatred, then Europe would reject "Palestinian" nationalism with the same loathing but they don't. They embrace it enthusiastically. I attribute no erudite motives to the Europeans. I think Europeans en masse have just taken the first convenient fig leaf of respectability to revert to the Jew hatred that is simply inherent in Europe's DNA.

Levi Sokolic

February 6, 2011

N/A

I was very impressed with what you said and think there is a great deal of truth in it. I first came across Kuhn when I was at university, and his ideas were then new. I was impressed then and have remained so.

I am American but have long lived in the UK. The UK is a country that has truly flished itself down the toilet of history. The historical England no longer exists. I have seen it disappear in the decades I have lived here. It is quite true that the English elites - poliical, cultural, academic, media - take the UN seriously as a source of legal legitimacy and authority despite the reality of this silly, failed organisation of kleptocrats, thugs, and dictators. They also worship the EU and willing have surrendered British sovereignty to the EU. The elites here actually beat their breasts over the "legality" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That neither the EU or the UN are democratic institutions is irrelevant. They are blind to the reality that the EU is one of the biggest threats to generations of hard won freedoms, liberties, and social progress.

I would like to make some points that perhaps others have pointed out already:1. The same people who pillory and denigrate Israel and European nations are the very same people pushing hard for a Palestinian nation and who now look with glee at what is happening in Egypt. They also tend to favour certain 3rd world nations as okay if not holy.

2. You did not mention anti-Semitism, which is endemic in Europe. It almost seems genetic in them. And it has little to do with Israel, which is only an excuse. Further, I have noticed that the anti-Semites of Europe also tend to be extremely anti-American and see both Israel and America as the cause of all evil in the world. There is a profound irrationality and racism in Europe that cannot be neatly labelled merely under hatred of the nation-state. America is profoundly unsettling to the European mind. It is in some ways the antithesis of Europe. At heart is something that occurred to me when I had to take a module in British law. American law and legal system is derived from that of England, and is similar in many ways. Yet there is a profound difference. It is a difference in legal theory that rests on a totally different worldview. It is only legal theory but it goes to the heart of the cultural difference between the US and Europe and the fear and hatred of the latter for the former. In the US it is the people who are sovereign and the government and its politicians are tolerated by the people and permitted to exist. In Britain it was the monarch who was sovereign, and then Parliament (and now this is being given up to the EU) that is sovereign. The people are permitted to exist and live in the country. That is, America exists for the sake of its people, while England (and Europe) eixsts for the sake of its elite. Hence, European governments, including Britain, have a great fear and hatred of their own populations. The fear of the peasant revolt is almost genetic in the elites.

3. Christianity and the Christian worldview have metamorphosed into a secular leftism, which is a degenerate and secularised form of Christianity. Just as Christianity was universal, so too is secular leftism. Just as Christianity was profondly anti-Jewish, so too is secular leftism. Secular leftism is the new unviersal Catholic Church. Just as Christianity is salvationist and denies salvation outside it, so too with secular leftism.

4. Western society is profoundly degenerate and outright insane. Insanity is the new sanity and sanity is insane to them.

Heinrich von Mettenheim

February 2, 2011

Mettenheim Gronstedt Meyding

Bellow my comments in the form of a three brief thesis statements relating to your opposition of the nation state versus supranational paradigms:

1. The fact that Hitler has gained the power to pursue his attempt to impose Third Reich phantasmagories on other peoples is not owed to the predominance of supranational thought in Europe but rather to his demagogic success in Germany, which in turn resulted from the humiliation felt by a great part of the German people by the outcome of military competition among nation states in the First World War. Here lies the origin of the supranational paradigm within the founding states of what is now the European Union.

2. Since a claim requires an addressee, the homeland and independence claimed by Ben Gurion according to your impressive quote from his speech of the 30th November 1942, could have been claimed from none other then from a supranational entity, so loose it may be, bee it the civitas gentium within the meaning of Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden, the Leage of Nations or the United Nations (anticipated by the Declaration by United Nations in the year of Ben Gurion’s speech). Indeed Israel’s Declaration of Independence expressly refers to the Leage of Nations and to the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947. The role of the supranational paradigm could not have been illustrated better than by the fact that the support of Israel’s existence under international law, by all permanent Security Council members including the Soviet Union, has survived the Cold War.

3. I agree that the Europeans’ view on, and criticism of, Israel’s Palestinian policy is greatly influenced by its Jewish citizens being perceived as fellow-Europeans. Therefore, it should be easy for Israel to persuade the Europeans that it finds itself in the centre of a Sophoclean tragedy insofar as the European (or rather Western) concept of human rights (and its origin, the Hebrew concept of righteousness) conflicts with the demographic effect of granting them to a people which is open for the suggestion that paradise can be won by violence and suicide bombing. Israel should openly admit its moral conflict of interests. All the nation state paradigm would bring about, instead, is to expose it to the charge of adding to the Palestinians’ feeling humiliated.

Richard D. Wilkins

December 19, 2010

Gemini Stats

There is much to be said for your thesis postulating the overweening importance of the reigning European paradigm regarding the evils of nationalism on the poisoning of elite attitudes, there and elsewhere, towards Israel. In particular, it helps explain why the U.S., the Western nation least likely to submerge its nationalism, remains so supportive of Israel, as well as explicating underlying persistent European anti-Americanism.
Yet, I wonder. I would propose an even more insidious, if related, malignant paradigm: lingering searing European guilt over its colonial past. Every major European power had colonies. Some governed them better, such as Great Britain, some much worse, especially sanctimonious Belgium. Combined with an enduring post-WW I paradigm of pacificism, it has left the Continent prostrate before its enemies, internal as well as external.
While the "Auschwitz" paradigm ought lead to condemnation of nationalism everywhere, application in elite opinion turns out to be quite parochial, hardly universal. Focus always is on the West. There is no problem with emerging statelets such as Kosovo (though in Europe, a Moslem Albanian enclave) or East Timor. A Palestinian state remains a glittering goal. Support for "national self-determination" thus remains highly contingent, depending on location, culture, religion and race.
It was not nationalism, per se, but anti-Semitism, that led to Auschwitz. Anti-Zionism is today the new anti-Semitism. As much as anti-Zionists adamantly try to deny that, such intimate connection must continually be proclaimed.. The continued spread of this poison could, G-d forbid, lead to catastrophe, and not just for Israel and the Jewish people. It is the leading wedge pulling the International Left toward support of an illiberal Moslem World whose societal practices form a vrtual catalogue of offenses the Left purportedly absolutely abhors.
Countering this will not be easy. Continually pointing out how utterly bizarre this is, certainly is worth pursuing. And if anti-colonialism, rather than anti-nationalism, is the primary driver, there are other useful arguments to pursue as well. For example, Zionism as the Jews' exercise of national self-determination. Jewish millennial attachment to the Land of Israel, Palestinian nationalism being predicated on the denial of Jewish self-determination, etc.. It is no coincidence that a major Palestinian talking point has long been presenting Israel as a Western colonial implant in the Arab Mideast.
The broad-based worldwide campaign of demonization and delegitimization against the Jewish state represents an extremely serious existential threat. Addressing it remains difficult but undeniably essential. Doing so, though, clearly demands understanding its intellectual underpinnings. So I greatly applaud you for forcefully raising this issue and look forward to the wide-ranging discussion it undoubtedly will elicit.

Samuel D. Kahnowitz

December 15, 2010

New Jersey Medical School

The essay is very informative,and I certainly can appreciate the idea of paradigms as a construct with which to analyze the present crisis.

I wonder if the shift in paradigms comes from a mis-reading of 19th century European history by many western European intellectuals. We need to remember that Garibaldi and Cavour (and Kossuth) established the legitimacy of nation-building in order to safeguard the cultural rights of minority peoples. This idea ultimately attained its highest level of support at Versailles. We know that the founders of Zionism were able to justify, albeit with only a partial measure of success, the needs of the Jewish people by applying that paradigm at Sevres.

Unfortunately, Hitler and more "primitive" pre-Nazi German philosophers hijacked the legitimate paradigm of minority self-determination and used it as a step in founding a predatory empire based on race. National Socialism perverted the simple need for cultural expression into a license to dominate and destroy other cultures. That Nazis and Zionists have different values and different histories is swept away by an emotional need to repudiate a disaster that is the responsibility of the present generation's progenitors. How we can get ordinary Europeans, who may be unaware of their history, to understand this shift in paradigms is a goal that may be hard to achieve.

By the way, the First Reich was not founded by the Hapsburgs of Austria. After the death of Louis the Child (a descendant of Charlemagne through the family of Louis the German) in 911, the German nobles of Saxony selected as ruler Conrad Duke of Franconia, who was succeeded by Henry I the Fowler in 918. The accession of Henry marked the foundation of the Saxon Empire, which became known retrospectively as the First Reich. Centuries after its demise, the Second Reich was established by Bismark from the Hohenzollern dynasty of Brandenberg (Prussia). The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich are better known, as is the present regime.

Arnold Kaufman

November 15, 2010

Woodhill Supply Inc

What a wonderful analysis that really goes a long way to clarify the situation. However, I disagree with your suggestion at conclusion. The universities and their professors also buy into to the European paradigm and will not accept the ideas put forth in the books that will be written from another viewpoint. To think that a place like Columbia or UC Berkeley would have an intelligent discussion on the merits of Israel's right to exist from our point of view is ignoring reality.
After reading your essay, I was at the same time, both depressed and enlightened; the enlightenment leading to the depression. I think the conclusion has to be the ultimate end to the State of Israel, and likely this can be extrapolated to the US in particular and the West in general. This also explains how Islam, as it bridges borders is with in the same paradigm as the European model. These are quite frightening realizations. I hope I'm wrong.

Anne Marie Healy

November 14, 2010

N/A

I enjoyed your article. I might go so far as to say it is brilliant. It explains a lot. I need to go read Kant’s book, and then I can possibly add more, but at this point I would say we need to educate the world.

Nuno Wahnon Martins

November 14, 2010

European Friends of Israel

This is one of the best essays I've ever read on the subject.

As the European Affairs Officer I will be delighted to have you with us in Brussels debating with some High-Level people.

In any case, your letters are a light on our current academic situation.

Chalom Schirman

October 20, 2010

ENPC MBA

I have read with great interest your paper on Israel through European eyes.

As a lecturer in Geopolitics (who is a former Israeli diplomat), I have to confront the dangerous theses disseminated by post -modernists who seem to dominate the fields of International Relations, political science and even history in many Western European universities and in some Ivy League and Californian universities too.

Your paper analyzes the very epistemological root of the post-modernist poison; it serves thus as a useful antidote.

Let me draw your attention on the French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, who in two of his books (La raison des nations, 2006 and Les métamorphoses de la cité, 2010) draws some of the same conclusions as yours.

Another interesting French author who opposes the predominant intellectual defeatism of the West is Christian Delacampagne (like Manent he teaches in Boston) ; see his Islam et occident, PUF, 2003.

You are not alone

Eric Sommer

October 18, 2010

N/A

I finally got a chance to finish reading your article. It made great sense to me, confirming a feeling that I've had for a long time, but was unable to articulate the way you did.

I'd love to hear your opinion on how the issue of "Greater Israel" relating to this. Just as your article discusses the intellectuals in Europe and America who seek the end of Israel as a nation-state, we in Israel have our own people who seek to do the same thing. There are plenty of post-Zionists here working hard to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish homeland. There are also many voices out there that say that our occupation of Judea and Samaria has corrupted us. And those voices give strength to the post-Zionists. My question is: what if the territories ceased to be an issue (i.e., because of a peace treaty)? Would that silence a good portion of Israel's critics on the left and turn them back into defenders who could help us fight against the new paradigm of which you spoke? Or is that being naive? Phrased another way, how many of the critics of the occupation today do you think are really only critical of the occupation, as opposed to being anti-Israel post-Zionists using it as a convenient cudgel?

Why is this important? Because if getting rid of this issue could really help rally the people of this country back around our right to exist as a Jewish state, then it would be of great strategic value. As you stated, our greatest danger is not from Iran, it's from those who seek to delegitimize us. And I'd say that danger starts with our own countrymen, corroding our will from within. If making peace with the Palestinians would strengthen us in that respect, then it adds a lot of strategic value to doing so, despite the dangers or sacrifices. (This is similar to the argument for pursuing peace as a way of defending against the Iranian threat. Of course, whether or not the Palestinians will allow us to make peace is a different issue.)

Barry Werner

September 20, 2010

IDC Herzliya

You speak of two competing paradigms in European thought, the ideal nation state and the ideal super-national state. Since the mid 17'th Century until just recently the ideal nation state was the preferred paradigm (as you say, the idea had a long incubation and the first major instance of it was in the 16'th Century), but now, all of a sudden, with the establishment of the European Union, the preferred paradigm is the ideal super-national state. You say Israel is condemned because it represents the paradigm that is now, accidentally out of favor.

Your argument doesn't explain why the only ideal nation state in the world that is being obsessively singled out for condemnation is Israel.
• Israel isn't the only nation with an army in active use that willfully disregards the dictates of international consensus.
• In Israel's case, the settlements issue is the major sticking point because "everyone knows" that the settlements are illegal and Israel is flaunting its disregard for international law. With regard to other independent minded nations, human rights violations are the issue. Why should land trump human rights?
• Why is there so little European condemnation of the Arab states that exist totally outside either one of the two ideal paradigms, the ideal nation state or the ideal super-national state. The Arab states should be condemnable by European standards, using either paradigm.
• And surely Israel is a special case in that it is surrounded by barbaric, Medieval, pre-modern nations. Israel couldn't be expected to form the equivalent of a European Union with its neighbors, although it is more willing to create regional alliances for resource allocations than Europeans would be under similar circumstances.

I think the explanation for European behavior is old-fashioned European bitchiness. Up until recently, with the start of European unification, Europeans routinely vilified each other, and they vilified Jews more than they vilified other Christians. Now that the lefties are trying to consider themselves all to be Europeans, they have only the Jews left to vilify. Bitchiness is the most persistent paradigm of Europe.

James A. Donald

September 9, 2010

N/A

Your view is too Jew centric: You need to look at other peaceful peoples that suffer massacre and persecution, while the world enthusiastically backed the murderers against the victims, for example the overseas Chinese, the Ibo, the Tutsi, the Armenians.

The Armenians have recently pursued the Jewish path, establishing their own hard fighting nation, and are no longer hated, while Jews are hated twice as much. Ask yourself what Armenians are doing right.

The Armenians, like the Jews, established their own state, which inevitably found itself in a state of war and near war with Islam, very similar to Israel's state of war and near war with Islam. They pursue that war by means far more drastic and brutal than Israel, and no one makes any fuss, while formerly the world was outraged by their failure to die sufficiently quietly. You might ask what they are doing right, that Israel is doing wrong.

The problem is hatred of softly influential groups

Wherever a group has disproportionate economic or cultural success that does not rest upon political power, does not involve the ability to kill people and break things, does not depend upon hard power, for example Jews, Americans, Indonesian Chinese, Indian Fijians, Indians in Africa, the Ibo in Africa, the same hatred occurs, the same accusations, the same fantasies, the same excessive and disproportionate attention, the same concoction of utterly trivial grievances into supposedly enormous crimes – even if the disproportionately successful group and the less successful group have no previous history, but only encountered each other fairly recently. I observe that we also get such interesting phenomena as self hating members of the successful group – the psychopathologies so characteristic of Jews are also characteristic of other disproportionately successful and correspondingly hated groups.

This phenomenon is the inverse of Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome is that we are apt to love those who control us by fear and murder.
Hatred of softly influential minorities, such as anti Americanism and hatred of overseas Chinese in various third world countries, is that we are apt to hate those whose intellectual creativity entertains or inspires us.

Amy Chua, author of the book “World on Fire”, which examines the problem of softly influential groups, under the demonizing and politically correct name “Dominant Minorities”, is a pretty good example of a self hating Filipino Chinese. It would seem that the Chinese sinned by being industrious and successful, and therefore the system that allowed them to succeed is supposedly to blame for bringing repression upon them in the Philippines, and massacre upon them in Indonesia.

There are a great many diverse newly affluent ethnic groups, among them the overseas Chinese of various Asian countries. An ethnic group succeeds, perhaps because of genetic superiority, perhaps because of a culture that encourages education, thrift and hard work, and so people hate that ethnic group – hate Amy’s ethnic group among others. Her analysis of the problem is absolutely accurate and spot on, though of course her implied solution – a political elite that imposes equality on all the non elite – has failed disastrously. She sees, and explains in detail, that her ethnic group is in the same hole as the Jews, and as a great many other similar groups, correctly analyzing the problem that afflicts overseas Chinese and Jews and many other groups as a single problem with many groups and many examples. The flaw in her analysis is the self hating and politically correct phrase “dominant minority”.

The groups she is talking about are not dominant, rather they possess soft power. If Americans wandered around shooting people to force obedience, everyone would love them, but Americans are hated because they persuade people to drink coca cola and watch terminator movies.

Similarly Hitler, a failed artist, was primarily enraged by the influence of Jewish plays and art. When people complain that America rules the world, they really complaining that they watch American movies, and thus people are playing attention to Americans instead of themselves.

The correct description of the problem is “non coercive influence”, and “softly influential group” Non coercive influence, soft power, is what a softly influential group possesses, and it makes that group hated.
Dominant minorities are often loved, and are never hated. The problem, rather is hatred of softly influential groups.

I observe that after the surge, since Americans flattened half of Fallujah, we at last saw large numbers of Arabs clerics, all of them Iraqis, most of them not very far from Fallujah, preaching genuinely moderate Islam, and large numbers of Arab intellectuals, a great many of them Iraqis, arguing for moderate and realistic behavior by Arabs and Arab countries, accurately perceiving the faults of Islam and the Arabs.
The American attempts to directly build a state were all miserable failures, and continue to be so, but when the Americans showed persistence in slaying their enemies, there was considerably greater willingness to examine American ideas and beliefs honestly and thoughtfully. Arab intellectuals and clerics changed their position, and we increasingly heared from Arabs that Arabs have problems because their society has something wrong with it, not because the outsiders are holding them down. Seeing that Americans would fight and not yield made in much easier for Arabs to understand and agree with the Americans, though I think Americans could have made the same point at considerably less cost to themselves.

Needless to say, once Americans stopped hurting people, all this reversed.

The critical variable is hard power, and hard power is the costs you can inflict on others. If a softly influential minority exercises sufficient hard power – that is to say, hurts enough people and destroys enough wealth, or demonstrates willingness and ability to do so – irrational hostility diminishes among those people who are potentially vulnerable to being hurt, and the softly influential group becomes able to make its case intellectually, able to win hearts and minds through persuasion and good deeds. The good deeds are only appreciated from people who can and do also do bad deeds.

Not only is the group less hated, but it less apt to hate themselves.
Not so very long ago Americans were having orgasms of guilt because a guard at Gitmo tortured a poor helpless terrorist by pissing a short distance upwind of a Koran. But Americans when flattened half of Fallujah no one was indignant.

When Americans knocked down a few dozen houses in Fallujah and killed a few people, there was a big outcry about the Fallujah massacre, just as there was about the Jenin massacre when Jews knocked down a few houses and killed a few people.

But when Americans came back a couple of years later and proceed the flatten half of Fallujah and kill a great big pile of people, not only are Fallujans fine with that, but more importantly, Americans are fine with that. If you google, you will still get five times more hits on Jenin massacre than on Fallujah massacre, and most, probably all of the hits for Fallujah massacre are for much smaller events from long ago where Americans were doing very little damage to people or property.
When Americans rolled their sleeves up and really started killing people and breaking things in vast numbers, then there was no more talk of “Fallujah massacre” – not from Arabs, not from Europeans, and not from Americans.

The solution to the problem that Amy so accurately describes is the Fallujah solution, the opposite of the solution she inaccurately prescribes. The answer to irrational hatred is to hurt people and break things. Since the hatred is irrational, crazy, and self destructive, a sufficiently hurtful and destructive response to hatred snaps people out of their madness, and creates an environment where communication and good deeds can work, as was happening in Fallujah and Anbar province.

Of course, that strategy can also lead to holy war, if people incorrectly evaluate other people’s legitimate grievances as irrational, crazy, and self destructive, but what we saw in Iraq was the quenching of holy war, with, to my great surprise, a massive outbreak of moderate Islam, We are not seeing any signs of a functional democracy or national unity, which was supposed to be the mechanism that would supposedly produce moderate Islam, but we are seeing moderate Islam despite, or perhaps because of, the severe disfunction of the institutions that were supposed to encourage it.

How much hard power is required? Small doses are counter productive, merely giving people superficially rational excuses for their irrational hatred. Gitmo produced the insane hysteria about torturing a prisoner by pissing upwind of a Koran, making the problem worse, not better. The Fallujah sized dose, however, has had dramatic good effects in Fallujah and noticeable good effect in America, winning the hearts and minds not only of Fallujans, but of Americans.

Bill Meisler

September 7, 2010

N/A

I am a descendant of Jews from Central Europe. All my life I have been a lover of European culture. I have frequently traveled to Europe, am fluent in German and Italian, play classical European music quite proficiently on the piano, am well read in European literature and am familiar with many aspects of European civilization. Yet for all my admiration of things European, I cannot forget that the darkness of antisemitism has always lurked behind the glitter of European civilization, an antisemitism which I believe is still endemic in much of the continent. The paradigm of European antisemitism, unlike the paradigms of science, seems never to change.
History rarely gives people a second chance to make up for previous injustices and errors. No doubt many Europeans regret the slaughter of the Holocaust, but as far as I can tell this regret extends only to dead Jews, and probably arises more out of feelings of guilt rather than out of any pity for the victims. As for live Jews, who of course include survivors or descendants of survivors of the Holocaust that Europeans so solemnly declare must never be repeated, many Europeans for the most part express little concern or even outright hostility, which to a large degree results from many Europeans' own feelings of inadequacy and ambivalence in addition to their habitual antisemitism.
Here then is my list of reasons for the negative European responses to Israel:
1. Traditional European antisemitism, historically fostered by the various churches, which is the foundation for most of the other the reasons listed below.
2. A willingness to deal with Jews only when the Jew occupies an inferior position, such as when the Jew is a victim or a helpless minority in another state.
3. A consequent discomfort or disapproval when the Jew occupies a position of power, independence or ability to determine his own destiny. With regard to Israel, which has a powerful army and is willing to use it, this Israeli military power contrasts sharply with the effete pacifism and appeasement so prevalent in Europe today. Similar observations can be made with regard to the Israeli economy, scientific prowess and even agricultural accomplishments. The tiny Jewish state is outstripping the entire continent of Europe, and Europeans do not like it, not only because the Jews are the ones outstripping them, but because Israel's vitality and daring are a sharp rebuke to their own lethargy and other shortcomings.
4. A lack of sufficient genuine regret for the occurrence of the Holocaust and empathy for the fate of the Holocaust's victims, which instead is given mostly lip service and monuments, something easy to do and soothing to the conscience, in combination with what has been termed "compassion fatigue." I suspect that there is much suppressed resentment in Europe over the fact that Europeans must bear the guilt for the unspeakable crimes of their parents towards the Jews. This resentment easily translates itself (in an almost sub rosa fashion) into anti-Israeli policies and opinions. In addition, criticism or opposition to Israel allows antisemitism to undergo a form of rehabilitation and become once again acceptable in polite society.
5. Unlike Americans, Europeans rarely identify with the underdog or act from idealistic or humanitarian principles, as can be seen from the course of European history over hundreds of years. Expediency and self-interest rather rules the day for them, and what they find presently expedient is to appease and conduct business with the Muslim world. That the majority of Europeans absurdly identify tiny Israel as the greatest threat to world peace (at least according to the reports of some surveys that I have read; I admit I am not an expert on this matter) proves the point.

Naturally the above considerations do not apply to all Europeans, but unfortunately they do apply to too many of them, particularly among the educated and governing classes and religious authorities. Contrast European behavior towards Jews with that of Americans with regard to righting the injustices committed against American blacks and the European deficiencies become even more obvious.
The Europeans now have a chance to right a previous wrong against the Jews, yet at a time when Israel needs their help, they are ineffective and even hostile to the Jewish state. That Europe should act this way should come as no surprise, not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because of the moral vacuum that exists throughout Europe today. However, just as nature abhors a vacuum in the physical world, so God abhors a vacuum in the moral realm. The Muslim scourge which is beginning to inflict itself upon Europe is a natural consequence of Europe's inattentiveness to its own soul.
The Holocaust was a disaster for the Jewish people, but not a tragedy, at least in the sense of
Ancient Greek tragedy. The Holocaust presented no great moral choice to the Jews, nor did it occur because of a flaw in the Jewish character. The tragic figure of the Holocaust is the gentile European population. It was the gentile Europeans who, like Oedipus, displayed hubris leading to hamartia and finally ate or destruction. The Jew was the suffering victim, it is true, just as the city of Thebes suffered for Oedipus's transgressions, but only Oedipus could set aright what went wrong based upon his moral pollution; which Oedipus did do at great cost to himself, and because he learned and accepted the enormity of his moral error he obtained the necessary catharsis so that he could die honorably. Europe has not undergone the necessary catharsis with regard to its own moral pollution even though it suffered through the self-inflicted desolation and tyrannies of the post-war years; therefore, in the framework of a moral universe, Europe will continue to suffer. Instead of indigenous Jews, Europe will have to deal with the threat of Muslims who come not to assimilate, but to dominate and conquer, and it is indeed ironic that, sixty years after the gentile Germans went to all the "trouble" of ridding Germany of a half million fellow Germans of Jewish descent whom, although culturally identical to the gentile Germans, the gentile Germans did not deem fit to be Germans, the Germans now have three or four million Turks in their country who truly represent a foreign entity with no interest in assimilation. Similar problems are arising in other countries of Europe. Overall I believe Europe will see itself gradually shrink in relevance as the twenty-first century continues and Asia comes into its own. In the meantime I hope that the European Jews will take the proper steps to save themselves. This is why Israel should be of major importance to every Jew. While I am a firm believer in American exceptionalism and recognize that the experience of the Jews in America has overall been exceptional in Jewish history in the diaspora, only the existence of Eretz Yisrael will guarantee the Jews a permanent refuge from the ever-renewing horrors of antisemitism.
You may say that I am being unduly harsh towards the Europeans. Perhaps that may be so. I recall a conversation I had with a Jewish Ukrainian woman I was dating about fifteen years ago. She was telling me about the antisemitism she had experienced in Ukraine and, when I asked her why so much antisemitism persisted there, she answered with her thick Slavic accent, "They cannot help themselves. They have it in the blood."
In any case, I am reminded of a quote in reference to Israel, attributed to Ben-Gurion, that I once read which stated, "It does not matter what the gentiles think. It is what the Jews do that counts." Whether he said this or not, there is much truth in this statement. It is futile to seek approval from a hostile world, including Europe, not only because of the frustration that arises from trying to achieve the unachievable, but also because of the illusory power that it confers upon the party you are trying to woo, somewhat reminiscent of the nouveau riche trying to ingratiate themselves with the old money, or of a person trying to cultivate a friendship with someone who has no interest in reciprocation. Excessive preoccupation with such activities can only lead to debasement and ignominy on the part of the pursuer and false confidence and contempt on the part of the pursued. Israel, like every other sovereign country in the world, has no need to explain itself. And it will not achieve acceptance or respect by flattering and courting Europeans or anyone else (this is particularly true of Arabs, who only seem to understand force). The era of the Hofjude is over.
As for myself, I shall continue to enjoy the fruits of European culture which after all belong to all mankind; moreover, much of that culture since the nineteenth century has been created and transmitted by Jews. But I do not intend to visit Europe ever again. Except Italy--I cannot give up Italy or its people.

Terry Levine

September 6, 2010

N/A

Thank you for your wonderful post. Very thought provoking.

I'm by no means a political science but I've read quite a lot on Israel and the Middle East. Here are my thoughts, for what they're worth...

The main thought I had about your idea of competing paradigms is this: Supposedly people view Israel as illegitimate because its foundation rests on a paradigm the European world with its new emerging paradigm disfavours. But the new European Union/internationalism still rests on nation states coming together to form this union, not individuals creating an international union. So why is Israel viewed any less legitimately than Holland or France? In this new paradigm, isn't nationalism still the entry point to internationalism? And if so, why would dismantling/legitimizing Israel be the answer instead of inviting it in to the new union as a nation?

I kept thinking as I was reading your post of another description I once read about socialism (-- and again, I'm no expert). I read once that Marx never expected Russia to be where socialism took root, but England. Because his view was that socialism was a response to capitalism and Russia was still a feudal society that hadn't even really reached the capitalist stage yet. In other words, the road to socialism was through capitalist excess and, Marx might explain, that's the reason Russia was never able to succeed as a socialist state. On the other hand, look at states like Sweden, for instance, that are for all intents and purposes successful socialist states because they went through a purely capitalist stage first.

My point is that it seems like this new international paradigm succeeds only after people who develop into national states feel comfortable enough in their nationalism to graduate out of it. If that's the case, Israel could one day become part of an international order, but only after it's accepted as a nation first.

Am I wrong? And if this is the case, why are the proponents of this new paradigm expecting Israel to follow a different path to internationalism than they did? Unless something else is still going on?

Yakir Plessner

September 6, 2010

Hebrew University

I dare think that I have something useful to add.
But first disclaimers: I am an economist, and am neither a moral nor a political philosopher. I have never read Kant and probably never will, but I have read quite a bit of political philosophy. And Kant, as far as I know, was a moral, not a political philosopher. And that is precisely the basis for the following remarks. I also want to tell you that I think that applying Kuhn (whom I read some 35 years ago) to the problem at hand is a brilliant idea.
My remarks rest on two pods: the first is a supposition namely, that Kant never considered the political organization of the super-national entity. Nor has any body else of substance. The super-national state is merely a negation of the nation-state i.e., it's alleged strength lies with what it is not, and not with what it is. The second is that today's most enthusiastic promoters of the super-national state are yesterday's Marxists.
The confluence of these two points is that there is no way that a construct devoid of the nation-state can be democratic. For the Marxists (and to a somewhat lesser extent the Progressives), that's perfectly fine. Individual freedoms never were of very much concern to them. For those who base themselves on Kant, it should be a real problem.
My colleague Meir Kohn of Dartmouth College is in the advanced stages of writing a book on pre-industrial Europe. The object of the book is to find out what could reasonably be described as the conditions that facilitated the Industrial Revolution. In the course of his inquiry, Meir devotes a lot of space to the various forms of government that existed in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. In particular, he is concerned with the degree of coercive power that resided with each of the types of government that evolved. What is relevant to the present remarks is his distinction between predatory government and associational government. The prime examples of the former are Spain and France; of the latter Holland and the UK. And the Industrial Revolution started in the latter two – France lagged behind, and Spain lagged badly behind.
It is quite obvious to me, that associational government, a structure designed to maximize the citizenry's involvement in government, and hence minimize tyranny, is what the framers of the US Constitution had in mind. Hence the federal structure and the severe limitations on the power of the federal government. Vestiges of this structure can still be found in the US, e.g. in the way town and county governments are structured (although the US today is a far cry from what the Founding Fathers intended).
The super-national state stands in sharp contrast to associational government. It cannot possibly be democratic. In fact, one does not have to speculate about this: the European Union is patently undemocratic. I don't know how much democracy still matters to the people in the nations that form the EU. But if they do care, the whole structure will come unstuck at some point.
Beyond that, one has only to consider the divides precipitated by the existence of a plethora of languages. How can a Pole campaign in England? Or an Italian in Holland?
I think that the impossibility of a democratic super-national state would constitute a reasonable basis from which to attack the Israel is Auschwitz paradigm.

Janice Senatra

August 30, 2010

N/A

I read Kuhn years ago, and believe his theses holds true for the sciences (less so for other fields, particularly those which tend to be far less "fact-driven" or rely on "interpretations").

CNN the other day (unfortunately, I don't have all the details -- in terms of names, dates) interviewed a founder, Mark Johnson, of an American organization to help the handicapped. The founder had suffered a paralyzing accident at a young age which left him confined to a wheel-chair. Because of his disability, he encountered a host of problems (especially with mobility -- even if he had a wheel-chair, the streets had curbs, the buildings had steps, and so on.) So he embarked on a campaign to raise awareness and present proposals to municipal leaders (such as modifying curbs, building ramps, re-designing washrooms, etc.) His efforts (after some time) proved successful.

The portion of the story that I found interesting was his recounting how he convinced a key person of the need for wheel-chair assessable buses. The person had listened to him attentively (all the facts had been presented), but the person still wasn't convinced. So, the handicapped person (Mr. Johnson) told him to meet him at a bus stop. That's when the person observed the frustration and the efforts it took just to board a bus. Mark Johnson stated: "Until there is an emotional change, no amount of intellectual arguments will change a person."

Another story. During the so-called "Second Intifada" with (almost) daily reports of suicide bombers, etc., (I believe this was in the summer of 2000, just before 9/11), I happened across a newspaper article published by Anglicans (a protestant church group). The headline (something about suicide bombers) caught my eye. I read the article and was shocked to discover that rather than condemn these terrorist murderers, the Anglicans were offering their sympathetic understanding. How did this occur? What would account for such attitudes?

Contained in the Anglican article was an added note about how they had gone on a free "tour" of "Palestine" (that's thanks to Canada's "Palestine House" located in Ontario.) In other words, they had been given a "tour" which would highlight "the plight:" of Arabs. And, coupled with (I suspect) an underlying antisemitism, the outcome was not all that astounding.

Anyway, the emotional aspects should not be discounted or over-looked when considering paradigm shifts outside of the scientific realm. (The question of whether supporters of Israel should engage in similar propaganda efforts -- the emotionally laden "reports" as per Arabs -- I wouldn't advise it. I think the facts should be adhered to, sans any maudlin appeals.)

Ian Solomon

August 29, 2010

N/A

Re the above article, I have seen this thesis in various forms before but I find it unconvincing. It does not explain why those same Europeans who supposedly reject Israel due to their “post-national” perspective are almost all fervently in favor of a Palestinian state for the Arabs. If they were truly against nationalism then they wouldn’t support the establishment of a Palestinian state – whether on the ashes of Israel or otherwise.

Do you have any explanation (other than anti-Semitism) as to how these two contradictory attitudes can be reconciled? To me it seems more like the situation of Jews in Europe where mutually contradictory positions (“Jews are communists” / “Jews are capitalists”) - that would not be simultaneously held regarding other peoples - were held against the Jews. Is not the same psychology in play here?

Richard L Rubenstein

August 29, 2010

University of Bridgeport

I found your fifth letter enormously helpful. The thirteen and fourteenth chapters of the Leviathan contain arguably one of the oldest defenses of the sovereignty of the nation-state. Hobbes argues that people avert the state of nature by conferring “all their power and strength on one Man, or upon one Assembly of men…” but Hobbes also observes:

“yet in all times, Kings, and persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War.”

The sovereign is always in a state of nature with regard to other sovereigns. Kant undoubtedly had Hobbes in mind when he attacked the nation-state as angrily as he did. I am also mindful of Weber’s definition of the state: “ a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” (Politics as a Vocation).

The situation has been made infinitely worse in the United States by the presidency of Barack Obama, a man of mixed background and confused identity. What you identify as the new paradigm has been bought by all too many American and western European Jews. I also found the Ben Gurion quote in your letter interesting. When I taught a course on the Shoah to my overwhelmingly non-Jewish students, I would tell them that the real flaw of Europe’s Jews was that they had neither the weapons nor the population with which to defend themselves. (I am the author of After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism.)

I also derived much intellectual profit from reading your book, The Jewish State .

David Sommer

August 28, 2010

N/A

I was very interested in the article that you wrote concerning Israel and its many many trials, opposition, hatred that it has had to face during its almost 3,000 years now since the division of the kingdom under king Rehoboam, the son of Solomon. Israel has always had a very important part in the history of the world since G-d told Abraham that He would bless those that bless them and curse those that curse them and that through them all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:1-3).

Brad Fleisher

August 27, 2010

Lexbridge DC / Wm. H. Murphy & Co., Inc.

Your article is brilliant. It created three action items for me:

(1) To reread Kuhn’s book;
(2) To subscribe to Jerusalem Letters and eagerly await your next article on this topic, which hopefully will address your point “ . . . we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed”; and
(3) Write my political representatives, again, encouraging them to support Israel in its own self-defense by not letting Obama leave Israel in the lurch when it singularly takes up the defense of the Western world by attacking Iran.

I’d be interested in a recommended reading list, if you have or can suggest one.

Joel Farber

August 27, 2010

Duke University

I was very stimulated by your piece applying Kuhn to Israel, and I was convinced--up to a point. The point that stumped me is this: why are the Europeans and other anti-nation-state critics of Israel so eager to embrace a nation-state they call "Palestine?". Sauce for the goose seems to be poison for the gander.

Steven M. Levy

August 27, 2010

Kamber Management Company LLC

Thank you for your insightful article. I have shared it with my boys. They are college age and Zionists. I agree with your conclusion. The extent of the intellectual paradigm shift in the U.S. is illustrated by the election of Barack Obama. While it is far from irreversible in the U.S., Europe is certainly a different matter. If you have not yet read it, I recommend Timothy Ferris’ The Science of Liberty. I believe it offers support for a more useful paradigm.

Yehuda Poch

August 25, 2010

OneFamily Fund

I am very impressed with the breadth and depth of your thoughts in your Jerusalem Letters articles.
I find that there is one view of the world's increasing apathy toward Israel that you left out of your article.
That view is continued anti-Semitism.
The European idea of an end to nationalism and a preference for universalism, as applied to Israel, SHOULD lead to the conclusion that Israel, like the European states, should be welcomed into a union that would obviate the need for its own national existence in favor of finding protection among the universal nation of peoples.
Yet we find instead that it is ISRAEL that is rejected, not the STATE of Israel. When Israel expresses an interest in joining the European Union, it is rebuffed. When it tries to join a UN regional grouping, it is prevented. When it joined the OEC a few months ago, there was significant opposition to the idea - if not to the vote. Even the Red Cross has never fully accepted Israel as a member.
Kant's idea of universalism was not only a rejection of independent national states based on their selfish use of power, it was also the inclusion of all peoples under a universal form of rule that would do away with the need of one nation to oppose another and usher in a kind of mutual dependency that would guarantee the absence of war. It was democracy taken to a universal level.
The European paradigm as applied to Israel, though, continues to be exclusionary, perpetuating the need for Israel's people to maintain a defensive posture against external threats. And the reason Israel is treated this way while France, Germany, Denmark and the others are not, and while all other countries outside of Europe are not, is that Israel is a Jewish state, while the others are not.

Zita Rainer

August 25, 2010

N/A

I've just read your Jerusalem letter of July 14 titled 'Israel Through European Eyes'.

You argue that "national self-determination... lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel towards Israel..."

How do you explain that the same people (and the same European nations) who, in your opinion, condemn Israel based on this new paradigm, strongly support the idea of Palestinian self-determination and a Palestinian nation state?

Michal Horneman

August 24, 2010

N/A

I read your article with fascination. It definitely provides interesting insights. Concerning your main proposition, however, that hatred of Israel stems from the changing of the paradigm from nation-state to universalist sovereignty, there is an enormous flaw in the logic, or perhaps just a salient point that you failed to address but have an answer for:
It seems that the same people who are against Israel no matter what it does are IN FAVOR of establishing a separate Palestinian state – supporting "two states for two peoples." Maybe some of them are in favor of one bi-national or multi-national state "from the river to the sea". But many are definitely for the expression of Palestinian freedom and identity in the traditional way – establishing their own nation-state. They do not criticize the Palestinians (who were never even a nation) for wanting what every other people wants/wanted. They consider it a "natural" desire.

Peter Lupu

August 23, 2010

N/A

My name is Peter Lupu and I am an Israeli who lives for several decades in US. I just read your paper "Israel Through European Eyes" and I found it very novel and insightful. Since my background is philosophy I am familiar with Kuhn's work. I think that your use of Kuhn's conceptual apparatus to describe a paradigm shift in certain intellectual circles in the West from the nation-state paradigm to a universalist paradigm is right on the mark. Moreover, I think that you have identified here certain deep trends worth exploring further. However, I am not sure that the apparatus of paradigm shift alone suffices to explain the hostility toward Israel that seemed to have emerged and grown stronger in the last few decades in certain intellectual circles in Europe, US, and even Israel. After all, the proponents of the new universalist paradigm do not express the same degree of hostility toward the existence of the nation-states of say Iran, South-Africa, Russia, or Bosnia, for instance. They do not seem to be voicing so urgently the opinion that the world would be better off had these counties cease to exist as they seem to be voicing regarding Israel. And in the case of Bosnia, I am certain that the proponents of the new paradigm favored the creation of Bosnia as a separate state.

Thus, while I agree with your overall analysis and find it extremely important in explaining various recent trends and I certainly see it as an important component of explaining the specific phenomenon of the hostility against Israel, I am somewhat skeptical that it alone suffices to explain this particular phenomenon. Something else must be involved that focuses this universalist paradigm to target specifically Israel as the one nation state that ought to be among the first to go. My question is: What is in your opinion that other element?

Motty Perel

August 22, 2010

ANTS

I just read your July 14, 2010 letter Israel Through European Eyes.
I cannot argue against it. It agitates my intellect. It creates a storm in my heart. It sounds true to me.
Is it going to turn my general direction from Right to the Left? I hope not.
I am a few pages before ending Rabbi Kahane's book They Must Go. I have heard about his ideas, mostly from unsympathetic people and a few sympathetic, but this is the first time I read something he wrote by himself. He was an honest man and an observer with open eyes and ears. He was willing to admit what he saw and heard, in contrast with the habits of the Israeli establishment. The book is published in 1981, so events relate no later than 1980. Now, another thirty years into the self-delusionary behavior of Israeli leadership, things with taking over of Israel by the Arabs are in much more advanced state. If in the 50s Israel could deport its Arabs with affordable money and blood, to do so now would take no less than a civil war. Considering that such a war would bring all Muslims of the world and half of Christians and Jews to the enemy side, all sure about their righteousness while Israelis are hesitating and contradicting themselves, the outcome would be more horrible to Jews than Iranian nukes.
According to your view (and now mine) the behavior of Israeli leadership cannot be changed in this generation. Changing its behavior in the next generation may not help: the time for the saving move is too limited.
So what is there to do? You leave your answer for later. I am eager to find out how you view the near future of Israel, say 10 – 30 years.

Diana Pinto

August 22, 2010

None

I stumbled on your article via an AJC link concerning Ben Cohen's article in the "Propagandist'. While I found his critiques not up to par, except for the fact that he rightly comments that Kant can also be used by advocates of the nation -state, I was taken by your analysis. I not only agree with you that Israel and Europe are on diverging tracks on essentials, but I presented a paper precisely on this topic at a conference at the university of Haifa last January, on the irreconcilable nature of the European and Israeli 'never agains. It tracks down the very different lessons each side learned from World War II and the Holocaust..in an attempt to get back to the root causes of these misunderstandings.

I agree with you on the need to rethink a new Israeli paradigm, but I am not sure that the best way to go about it is by setting up a European straw man, who purportedly thinks in such binary terms as your 'Israel is the anti-Auschwitz' versus 'Israel as Auschwitz'. Some hotheads may come up with such media provocative slogans, but that is not how serious European think. As a European Jew (yes, I use this definition seriously and not at all as an anachronism, even though I am also an American with a Harvard Ph.D.), and I am fully aware that the existence of such 'voluntary Jews' across Europe today is philosophically problematic for such anti-European readings. (Back in the optimistic 90's AJC published a paper of mine on the 'new Jewish presence in post-1989 Europe). Behind the rhetoric, we all know that there are fundamental democratic questions at stake which cannot be swept under the rug, and principles which one part of Israeli society feels must be preserved, lest the country lose its own Western bearings. Demonization or sweeping assessments of Europe as (of course) 'antisemitic' do not lead to creative thinking...and Israel like all of us needs such thinking desperately.

In the 21st century, we who live in countries which are founded on classical Western democratic principles (which of course nowadays include or at least acknowledge the Jewish tradition) will be quite marginal versus the rest of the world population, be it China, India or Brazil. We cannot afford to have such a European-American-Israeli rift in our own Western ranks. Hence the need to rethink our paradigms in an open and self-critical manner, one that would perhaps minimize somewhat both America's and Israel' historical uniqueness in the process, while also holding Europe more accountable. The result would be a less than automatic dumping of postwar 'Europe' in the trash bin of History.. .not because it is such a 'great' institution, but simply because its principles and the core values they incarnate cannot simply be brushed off with the constant ironical reference to the convenient slogan of 'it's the Realpolitik, stupid...' which underlies so many American Jewish readings of the old continent. One American Jewish constitutional specialist who read my paper could not believe that I was taking the European 'never again' even a bit seriously. Yet, I am sure you would agree that the alternative to our Western tenets so far is not terribly appealing.

Eitan Ingall

August 21, 2010

University of Michigan

I wanted to write to you a quick note simply to thank you for this brilliant essay. "Israel Though European Eyes" is honest and shows a keen awareness of the evolution of paradigms of not only European Christians, but also by American Christians, and Jewish students in both the US and Israel.

I am recently graduated from the University of Michigan, having also studied at Oxford University, where I was extremely active in the pro-Israel and Jewish communities. However dire you might think the situation to be, it is tenfold worse. I implore you to take my word for it.

But unlike in the late 1990's and early 2000's, I do not mean 'worse' in the sense of Columbia Unbecoming or Divestment Resolutions or mock-Apartheid walls. Somehow, all these inflammatory forms of protest are old news and seen as 'extreme' or 'dialogue stoppers.' Even the most extreme of pro-Palestinian organizations and Muslim Students Associations like those at the University of Michigan, have abandoned these tactics in exchange for strategies of pressing dialogue. Simple conversation and questions, not about facts or history, but about fundamental, underlying philosophical concepts easily reveal a fundamental lack of understanding, confidence and belief in the Zionist cause amongst many of my peers.

It has been a perpetual challenge for me to describe with the necessary specificity exactly how this came to be, or how it might be changed. I do know however, that two things are certain: 1) While the issues facing Israel might not be entirely endemic to the college campus, their philosophical and rhetorical (and not simply physical) nature, particularly of late, makes the University of central importance 2) "Pro-Israel" organizations in the U.S. are completely blind to the real challenges facing Israel on college campuses, and continue to fund events that are off-target, a complete waste of time and often wholly counter-productive.

Stanley Cohen

August 20, 2010

None

I just read your article on this intelectual shift that you indenify in the west.

This is a shift in the making, it is far from complete and can thus be opposed
and defeated. It is largly leftist, elitist and not yet daring to speak its name.

A good start maybe to rewite your article for European readers and maybe open
debate on the subject. After all, nationalism is alive and well outside the elitist
strongholds. The EU as an institution is not that popular. Esp in the UK.

I also think that pacifism, or may be even defeatism, might be playing a role in
this shift. This is again an elitist position and there is a growing number of
people who see a danger from Islam that might help to arrest this shift.

David Hecht

August 20, 2010

Vanderbilt University

I read your article on Israel Through European Eyes and found this argument very fascinating. There are certainly parallels between Kuhn's explanation of science and international relations. However, I find one major difference between science and politics, and it has serious implications for how one goes about defending Israel.

Scientific theory (ie. a shift from Aristotelean thought to Newton to Einstein) can be quantified. Aristotle's 4 elements of earth, wind, air and fire eventually give way to 118 elements in our modern periodic table). Science progresses on a linear scale (we are not going to retract back to Aristotle's theory of elements).

However, international relations progresses on a cyclical scale. Favorability toward the idea of a national state oscillates, depending on several factors (a global recession natural leads to protectionism).

Is it possible that nation states will eventually be favored in the near future? Or do you view international relations progressing in a linear nature, like science? Should defenders of Israel seek to reframe today's paradigm and highlight the benefits of the nation state?

Al Pilver

August 20, 2010

PRIMER

I believe my view of what is happening in the USA fits the ideas of your essay. As the population make-up in the USA evolves to a greater percentage of minorities, such as Hispanics and blacks, support of Israel will likely diminish because these segments of the population generally fit a different paradigm regarding Israel than those of us with European heritage. President Obama may be a good example of this. He spent 20 years in the Chicago church of Reverend Wright, a preacher with anti-semitic and anti-Israel views. So with that as a reference, it's not surprising that Obama's actions toward Israel have left much to be desired.

Chalom Schirman

August 20, 2010

ENPC MBA

I read with great interest your recent article on the (very dangerous indeed) new post-modernist paradigm.

Still, one point keeps bothereing me: post-modernism and other similar non-sense is shared only by Western elite (?) members, Europeans and Americans a small minority getting smaller by the year (demographic fact).
The vast majority of humanity (and its intellectual elites) still share the old paradigm based on: Peoples security, development and well-being is best assured and protected by Nation-States, sovereign on their own territories.

So you still need to explain why the Western post-modernists focus mainly if not only on Israel! At least eighty five per cent of human beings are still ready to defend their State's (or nation's) right to self determination and sovereignty in the "old" Westphalian sense.
Your "proud Dutchman" could as well see Palestinians, Kosovars, Georgians, Armenians, Venezuelians (of the Chavez confession),etc, etc, as the ones who "dare turn their backs on this effort, blessed by morality and reason, to attain at last the salvation of mankind".

But your Dutchman and his likes in Europe do NOT! Why? Shouldn't that be explained too?
Why this new paradigm ( I fully agree with the epistemological explanation) is not applied to the so-called emergent countries, not to speak of the so many Failed States in the world (the right word for ex-"developing nations")?

Is there a Jewish exception (that is the definition of plain anti-semitism) or does the new paradigm apply to all nation-states, but then why is it used only in Israel's case?

David Zarmi

August 20, 2010

N/A

I have been a big fan of your work since your book on Esther and the State of the Jews. Shalem is unique in Israel (and the world, despite at least analogous think tanks in the States).
I understand your argument regarding Israel’s vilification, and the solution appears to be the same: explaining, via PR, why Israel needs to exist. Perhaps a response to why internationalism won’t protect the Jews is the Soviet Union. But your essay leaves unanswered why Israel is singled out. Apparently the Palestinians, whoever they are, do deserve a national state and self-determination. Moreover, there are plenty of nationalist states, such as Myanmar/Burma, Turkey, Syria, Korea, or Japan. Most states are still nationalist. If only the members of the EU are willing to give up their sovereignty, they will have a lot of countries to hate. But Israel is singled out. (The article you cite by Wieseltier says it better.)

As you intimate, perhaps it is because the Jews should know better, but even the members of the EU itself restrict citizenship. The EU is complicated and by no means a single bloc of happy humanity. Ethnic Germans are treated differently than others in Germany’s immigration laws. Turkish workers give birth to children in Germany, but they are still not German citizens. I have trouble finding any reason for this beyond anti-Semitism. My guess is that this is merely the latest coating that the Europeans give it to make it palatable to their conscious minds. I suppose one might argue that making it uncomfortable for them intellectually can have good effect because they will not as easily act on their anti-Semitic impulses, but I doubt it. The best argument always seemed to be if you put the Jews in one place, you can get rid of all the Jews in your country. What this means nowadays is an argument for Jewish exceptionalism (and not Jews alone, but really any vulnerable minority – Kurds, Tibet, Southern Sudan, Christian groups in Iraq and Iran, etc.). Vulnerable minorities need self-determination until the rest of the world has shown itself to be beyond barbarism.

And of course all of this post-nationalism is nonsense with the current Islamic menace (unless we consider all those who believe in freedom to be a nation and can get them to move together and let the rest of the Westerners join Islam). Which really brings up the point that even the EU, if it exists, is a nation. The United State is a nation,, as is the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, and Australia. They don’t consist of a traditional ethnic group, but share some cultural norms (immigration could change this, but so far this is still the case with the United States). The EU does not allow entry to any individual of country without making sure that they fit the bill for their idea of what someone should be.

I just don’t find your argument and solution persuasive in light of my above ramblings. Let me know where you think I’m wrong, please, and thank you for all of your ceaseless activity in supporting human liberty and Jewish existence.

Amir Weitmann

August 19, 2010

N/A

I just read your Jerusalem Letter on the Israel Through European Eyes and I loved it. Thanks.

I just wanted to share with you something that happened close to a decade ago. It was probably in 2001 or 2002 and suicide bombers were blowing themselves up everywhere all the time, as you remember. The British Ambassador in Israel gave a talk in one of Katamon's synagogue about the situation and the mediator was then JPost's editor, if I am not mistaken.

The British Ambassador gave a most ridiculous talk about the need to talk to everybody, including to Hamas, but what was most surrealistic, to me anyway, was at the end of the talk, during the Q&A, when I asked him a question. I said: "OK, you are against incursions of Tsahal into territories controlled by the PA, you are against pinpointed assassinations, closures, and a a whole range of other measures (I don't remember which ones exactly) but you say that you recognize Israel's right of self-defense. So could you please mention even one military measure of self-defense which would be acceptable to you?". Obviously, he did not even answer my question.

With time, I started following reactions to Israeli military actions coming from Europe, and with the exception of the 2006 War in Lebanon against Hezbollah, I cannot remember one case when we enjoyed support for any action. They all say Israel has got a right to self-defense, but that is in theory. Practically speaking, somehow, this right never finds any concrete application, which really means it does not exist.

It just seems to me that it fits very well with your thesis.

Behatslah'a,

Michael Reynolds

August 19, 2010

N/A

Yes, there is something in what you say. But there's more to it than that. These same 'former nations' now part of the European union, turn a blind eye to nationalism in their own back yard: where is there any outrage against Turkey for expelling the Greeks of Northern Cyprus, and for crushing Kurdish freedoms? Where is their outrage against Russia for its constant threats to Ukraine and the Baltic republics, to its wars of aggression against Georgia? These places are on the fringes of Europe, true, but then so is Israel.

And that's just at Europe's peripheries. Everywhere else outside the blessed anti-national sanctity of Europe is still fiercely nationalistic: Pakistan, Venezuela, Indonesia, Mexico et al. And don't even get me started on China or--for that matter--North Korea. No, the missing component here is anti-Semitism, which your otherwise excellent artiucle avoids mentioning .

Brian Driscoll

August 19, 2010

N/A

Your essay, Israel Through European Eyes, is a seminal contribution to the ongoing debate. But I believe you needlessly, and perhaps fatally, circumscribe the issue by limiting your options to building a new, or rebuilding an old, paradigm with which to challenge the new paradigm upon which hatred of Israel festers.

Pace Kuhn, the solution involves not just new paradigms (or restating an old one) but a paradigm or line of argument that challenges the currently reigning false one. Simply restating the old paradigm upon which the legitimacy of Israel rests will not do. You need to demonstrate and reveal, as your essay does to a small degree, the failure of the new paradigm.

Practically, this involves pointing out the systemic failures of powerful supra-state organizations like the EU and the UN. Already, in their short histories, such organizations have demonstrated their inability to defend the basic rights and cultural aspirations of many who come under their 'protection', their inability to preserve the values and achievements of economic and political pluralism, and their failures to stimulate, or even comprehend, the market basis of economic development. These and other failures need to be shown to be inherent in such political organization and revealed as harmful to human political and social aspirations, as well as peaceful resolution of conflicts -- in short, the failure of collectivism.

What is also needed is a vigorous defence of the successes of the nation-state as defender of economic and political pluralism, as well as protector of cultural values and national values. After a generation of academic focus on the alleged dark side of nationalism, a fresh rethinking is certainly overdue, and it should not be difficult to point out how such values are better protected by, say, the American constitution and check-and-balances form of democracy than they are by the machinations of the despotism-riddled UN. Likewise, I believe that, despite the rise of the new anti-Israel paradigm, the burden of proof remains upon it to show that a UN-type organization can better protect Jews than does the state of Israel. Funny, isn't it, how the new paradigm demonizes the nation-state of Israel but has nothing negative to say about Arab nationalism or Islamic collectivism.

Thanks for the stimulating essay. I hope your ideas reach many minds.

Andrew Berman

August 19, 2010

N/A

After reading your essay, I better understand the European argument that, not only are Israelis the new Nazis, but also that the Palestinians are the new Jews. After all, the Palestinians are perceived as being without a homeland, thus being "close to the Kantian Ideal" that the Jews had before Israel. Which does raise the question-- how would the perception of the Israel/Palestinian fight should the Palestinians ever get a State? An academic question which I personally hope will remain unanswered, by the way.

A second point:
In the personal sphere, calling attention to paradigms can be an effective debate tactic, if only because you are then focusing the debate on the true issue. Consider the following dialog:
European Trans-Nationalist Progressive: "Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews."
You: "How strong is your belief that countries should act aggressively against their declared enemies?"

Andrew Kennard

August 19, 2010

N/A

I read your essay "Israel Through European Eyes" with great interest however I wonder whether the paradigm you refer to has a much wider origin.
To me, there seems to be withing the West a certain self rejection. So rather that simply the rejection of the notion of the nation state, one might argue that there is a wider rejection of Western civilization.

Perhaps this is evinced by the fact that a post-nationalist Europe never expresses any rejection of Arab nationalist states.

David DeMello

August 18, 2010

N/A

i read your argument of paradigm and have come to the conclusion that it is incomplete because it ignores the newly recognized danger festering from within the European sphere. i speak of the strong identity of the self segregating Islamic community within the weak transparent non-local-identity called EU and recalling Bernard Lewis's

"In the Islamic world, from the beginning, Islam was the primary basis of both identity and loyalty. We think of a nation subdivided into religions. They think, rather, of a religion subdivided into nations. It is the ultimate definition, the prime definition and the one that determines, as I said, not only identity, but also basic loyalty. ...."

a weak identity is a predicate of the "new paradigm" and the EU with this newly minted paradigm would have no countering mechanism for that which it has accepted within its body. That is changing and its evident by recent political/economic activity. if all politics are local then there must exist an identity associated within that political neighborhood. The fact that it has spontaneously erupted in disparate locations speaks to its emerging strength. This is the emergent that will lead to paradigm changing. and will be manifest as the EUnuchs reclaim their identity.

Carl Tessler

August 18, 2010

Carl H. Tessler, P.C.

I read your article with great interest and I suspect that there is more than a little truth to your thesis that the Western world’s growing antagonism toward Israel is the product of a paradigm shift away from the concept of national sovereignty toward one of international government. What puzzles me, however, is how a world that increasingly vilifies nationalism is so ready to support the idea of a Palestinian state and the right of the Palestinian “people” to self-determination? It seems to me that if the delegitimization and villainization of Israel can be explained by the waning of nationalism as a political desiderata, then the entire concept of a Palestinian state and the almost universally acclaimed “two state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be flatly rejected by educated Westerners, instead of being embraced as a panacea. How can the national homeland of the Jewish people be vilified as a modern day “Auschwitz,” while the legitimacy of the Palestinian Arabs’ national aspirations is almost universally accepted?

I fear that no matter how we try to rationalize the situation, the reality is that the Jews are held to a different and impossibly higher standard than any other people on earth and that no matter what we say or do, we will always be found wanting and compared unfavorably to other national and religious groups. Western society appears to suffer from a certain moral blindness when it comes to the Jewish people. How else can we even begin to understand how Israel can be characterized as a Nazi-like state, while repressive Arab dictatorships (such as the PA and Hamas-led governments in the West Bank and Gaza) are given what amounts to a “free pass”? Even if we could successfully restore the old paradigm of the nation state, I suspect that at the end of the day, Israel would somehow still be regarded as illegitimate and the liberal democracies of the West would continue to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

In my view, we are dealing with an insidious double standard which has become so natural that those who are guilty of perpetuating it, don’t even realize what they are doing and would be genuinely offended if anyone had the temerity to suggest that they are being anything less than perfectly evenhanded.

Steve Brody

August 18, 2010

N/A

Your article was fascinating to read. I am also sure my following question is one you have heard many times before. If a shift in the ending of the nation-state paradigm is driving European hate for Israel, why is this same paradigm not driving the same European demands on the Arab countries?

Andy Konermann

August 18, 2010

N/A

Thank you Yoram for sharing your insight, I often am at a loss for words with those I encounter who seem to possess this inexplicable predisposition to being vehemently opposed to anything Israel does – your logic goes a long way to help understand it.

You have given me a rare glimpse into their minds that may help me (and the thousands like me) understand how to better frame the argument.

Well reasoned, well written, absolutely beautiful piece. I had read Kuhn’s Structure back in college but had never considered the relevance… I will be re-reading it at your suggestion.

Thank you again - for taking your time to help so many others understand this debate more clearly.

Melvyn Huff

August 18, 2010

N/A

I just read your excellent article but I wonder how those supporting the new paradigm deal with
the possibility that their supernational state could become an oppressor in the same way that
germany was and if it were a world state there could be no outside opposition. What leads
one to believe that the people who run the world state can be assumed to be any better
than those who run nation states.

Barney Wainer

August 18, 2010

N/A

I read your article with great interest and enjoyed its academic clarity. Your reference to education at a young age as a (likely?) solution brings me to the subject of anti-Semitic/Isareli indoctrination in Arab and Muslim and Palestinian schools and begs the question of how such a nation-state paradigm can be supported by the non nation-state camp. It seems to me that they are prepared to turn a blind eye and that good old antisemitism still overrides both paradigms. Am I not thinking clearly or is there a Kuhn/Kantian answer ?

Daniel Jacobson

August 18, 2010

University of Michigan

I'm writing to express my admiration -- though that word seems too weak -- for your magnificent essay, "Israel Through European Eyes," which I just discovered. It is brilliant, and the best thing I have ever read on this perplexing and, to me, deeply disturbing subject. Of course there are "realist" explanations as well of the European attitude, but I've always found them inadequate. Your analysis is, I think, profound. My only hesitation is that I think you may overestimate the degree to which the US, outside of its intellectual class, is following Europe. And (to its great dismay but not mine) the US intelligentsia seems substantially less potent in its political influence than the European elites (at least as I observe matters from here).

It was a joy to read your essay, which I literally just finished, and I look forward to reading the other Jerusalem Letters.

Ronald A. Factor

August 18, 2010

N/A

Just read your article, with great interest. One thought however continues to puzzle me. Subsequent to the 67 war Israel seemed to enjoy unprecedented popularity in the west. Granted, it was seen as the underdog, unlikely to survive so powerful an attack, yet it did and remarkably successfully. If what your article says is true the delegitimazation process should have started sometime subsequent to 1948, or very soon after 1967. It seems a more recent phenomenon. I cannot reconcile this with the strong arguments you make in your article. I recognize that I may be looking at timing with a too-sharp focus and that these trends tend to develop over decades and centuries.

I’m not an academic, just an engineer and businessman with a strong interest in the subject. Thanks for the article.

Steven Dickstein

August 18, 2010

None

I was linked to your essay through Daniel Pipes’ site, and I congratulate you on a well-written and well-reasoned piece. I’ve shared it with others, and I look forward to reading your thoughts in the future.
I’m no academician, and I’m bereft of the facts and figures by which persuasive, intellectual argument can be made, but I wonder if your essay somehow sanitizes common, garden-variety Jew-hatred by proposing that it has intellectual underpinnings as any paradigm must. I’m wondering if this new purported paradigm of universalism which gives rise to “anti-Zionism” is really just a socially acceptable alternative to another historical paradigm by which Jews are perceived as thieves, liars, and despoilers of gentile womenfolk. In other words, while I know you seek a repair of the old paradigm of Israel as the opposite of Auschwitz, does not your positing of this new paradigm give our enemies respectable cover? After all, the motto “I want to see the end of Israel because I believe in world-citizenship” is so much more harmonious than “I want to see the end of Israel because I hate Jews.”
And what of other small, beleaguered countries, hounded by neighbors superior in strength and inferior in morality ? I’d believe that those on the left who are so critical of Israel at every turn are deeply wounded by the inability of Tibet to be truly independent. Where is the universalist paradigm here?
Perhaps, however, I have my own immutable paradigm which, at age 62, I am powerless to change. My paradigm is: we were, are, and ever will be a people apart. We were, are, and ever will be vilified. World War II and its brief aftermath in which Jews enjoyed a hiatus from hatred by “enlightened” thinkers represented, to me, a transient aberration caused by an indescribable cataclysm. But memories are short, and predispositions are intact. To me, there hasn’t been a paradigm shift; the paradigm has merely shifted back. I pray, though, that my paradigm, like Aristotle’s, will be proven wrong.

Paul Freeman

August 18, 2010

None

Thank you for this fine essay which goes a long way to explaining Israel’s predicament. I would like to disagree with one point.
Paradigm shifts, which are by nature painful, are born of necessity. They occur when the data no longer supports the old paradigm and, crucially, the old paradigm is experienced as a hindrance to progress or well-being. Books and ideas give expression to, or elaborate on, what has already been experienced in the material world and only gain currency when they conform to perceived human need.
Today the global march of Islam is the best candidate for that which will bring about a restoration of the old paradigm in the West. To the extent that Europeans make the connection between loss of sovereignty through the EU and the Islamization of their societies there is hope for that revival.
In this connection it is interesting to note the vocal support for Israel by anti-Islamization movements like the EDL in Britain. Given the public hostility of Jewish leaders here to the EDL and the fact that, presumably, this support has not been invited by the Israeli Government, it remains something of an anomaly. In my view it can only be fully explained in terms of, at grass-roots level, a rejection of the new and revival of the old paradigm.

Monique Schwarz

August 18, 2010

Amber Films Pty.Ltd.

Thank you for your most instructive and inspiring approach in articulating the position of Israel in the world as part of a larger paradigm to do with the nation state.

I have a question. How is it that the Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia etc all who operate as nation states, often belligerent nation states who assert their own will on many other states and who place no constrainst on their right to self defence, are not viewed with the disgust of the nation state that Israel is.

Peter Skurkiss

August 18, 2010

None

An absolutely excellent analysis. Very insightful.

And by extension, I can imagine the inner feelings the Euro-elite have towards the U.S., where nationalism is very strong among the people.

However, it is one thing for neutered Europe to pick on tiny Israel, but it's orders of magnitude different to tangle with America.

I intend to read more of your work -- along with Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Sol Shalit

August 18, 2010

Hebrew University

THIS is the break-through we've all been waiting for. You did it. Kudos!

Yishar Koach!

Henry Solomon

August 18, 2010

N/A

I found your discussion of the paradigms and the European view as arising from the world government political ideals of Immanuel Kant to be very insightful. My understanding of Kant's views is that his duty bound morality, his perverted view of the value of the individual, and his cynical attempt to "prove" that the mind was incapable of knowing reality, as expressed in his "Critique of Pure Reason," rather than presenting a solution to the requirements of civilized government, set the stage for the rise of Nazism itself.

For the only analysis I know of which brilliantly identifies the cause of Nazism and the danger of its presence in the world today, I strongly recommend Leonard Peikoff's "The Ominous Parallels" (1982).

Dionysis Theodorou

August 18, 2010

N/A

I enjoyed your article very much. It has helped me understand why it seems that I am talking to a brick wall most of the time.

I will take your advice and read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Daniel Greenberg

August 18, 2010

Pepperdine University

Hi, my name's Daniel, and I’m a first year international law student at Pepperdine with a focus on Jewish rights. I’m writing in response to your letter “Israel through European Eyes”. Your thinking was very accurate, and I found it quite striking. As you pointed out clearly, Israel is at odds with the new paradigm. Yet, as a student who has grown up in a post-Intifada world, raised in America by a conservative Jewish father and an Israeli mother yet surrounded by the extreme left (Jews and gentiles alike) all my life, I believe that it is more than this. Israel is in conflict with the new paradigm as an expression of Jewish identity. While Zionism and its realism fought to give us physical might, I’m sure you agree that it has been essential but insufficient.

The key, I would wholeheartedly argue, is Jewish identity. Zionism is an expression of Jewish identity. As Aviel Roshwald strongly argued, if the concept of the nation has any reality, what nation has stronger legitimacy than the Jewish people? As Shlomo Aronson states, at the core of anti-Semitism in German, Western, and Arab policy was a dismissal of Jews as a legitimate nation with legitimate rights. I wholeheartedly agree that hasbara, no matter how clear, is a backup tool. The key, as I said, is Jewish identity. The key for Israel’s legitimacy, with which we can use the Jewish people as a tool to regain the paradigm that allows Jews to be Jews and that allows Jews to express their Jewish identity freely and securely, is a strong Jewish identity. If many Jews themselves seek to delegitimize Israel to “save it from itself”, then strong Jewish identity is clearly in bad shape. Israelis themselves commonly see Israeli and Zionist identity as superseding Jewish identity. American Jews dissolve their Jewish identity, slowly intermarrying out of existence. Indeed, at the spearhead of many leftist ideologies, Jews such as Marx have historically been quite anti-Jewish. In the new paradigm, one must protect genetic Jews from being destroyed if convenient, but Jews who set themselves apart by having a strong Jewish identity are seen as repulsive. What can we do?
It’s simple. We must argue, through supporting Israel and having a stronger Jewish identity, that we are a real people and our rights are real. We must commit to stronger Jewish education, as Jewish identity is flourishes in our heritage—it is no coincidence that the weakest pro-Israel Jews are the ones with the weakest Jewish identities. This is a message that most Jews can be united on. Furthermore, to disagree with these Jews is to say that the Jewish people are a religion and not a people, or that do not have the rights as other people. In other worse, dropping the evocative Holocaust-related terminology that arouses new paradigm perceptions, to disagree would be anti-Jewish.

Furthermore, opponents would not be effective in taking a pro-Palestinian stance. Even Jews who argue for strong Jewish identity can be pro-Palestinian. After all, what good person doesn’t want Palestinians in general to be happy people, with good lives, so long as they respect our rights? We can use logic to attack their claims, but the reality is that generation after generation, their identity is consolidated by the Arab governments that refuse to take in their fellow Arabs as citizens, and force them into camps as a weapon against Israel. Without the freedom and prosperity that Jews have, Palestinians cannot so easily intermarry and escape out of Palestinian identity. To further emphasize our preferable paradigm, we can side with the Palestinians against the enemies that are both convenient to our narrative and accurate to history: the Arab elites. These elites hopped from various ideologies, but all these ideologies, and all the associated behaviors, could be termed imperialist and disrespectful of the rights of Jews as legitimate people, both collectively and individually. From my studies on pre-war Baghdad, it is my estimation that anti-Zionism is essentially a pillar of imperialist and radical pan-Arab ideology. This spans from the 20th century, when Jews immigrating to their homeland were opposed and Jews in Baghdad and the rest of the Arab world faced a rise of anti-Semitism, to the current day, when the “moderate” Abbas continues a century of rabid rejectionism that dooms Jew and Palestinian alike by avoiding direct negotiations and claiming that no Jew will be allowed to live in the Palestinian state. Focusing on the Arab/Muslim elites (Islamic imperialism, if anything, is worse than the previous imperialism Israel has faced) will serve two purposes: 1) new paradigm or not, people, Muslims included, will have to choose whether or not to tolerate the intolerance of radical Islam, and will see Israel’s enemies as, accurately, more imperialist; 2) the true ideological enemy of the Jews will be highlighted—not Zionism, but the anti-Jewish propaganda that the elites in the Middle East have cultivated, and that makes peace with Jews as a sovereign people impossible regardless of their concessions.

These are brief points that I believe will be much more persuasive than logic alone in guiding action to defend Jews against delegitimization in a world of changing paradigms, in which Zionism is no longer a sufficient vehicle, and in which we need something else—what I like to call Israelism. Israelism is a focus on the nation of Israel and its rights, supported by Jewish education (including Hebrew in the Diaspora) to build Jewish identity and bridge the widening gap between Israel and Diaspora, and nudge Jews from secularism towards Judaism. One could say that this is what will give us a new generation of Jews that help us instead of Jews that hurt us. Again, your letter was especially impressive, and I hope that in the future I may benefit from more of your ideas on the issue.

Thomas L Moore

August 18, 2010

N/A

Fascinating essay. Referencing Kuhn, the term "paradigm shift" has been used to loosely describe all sorts of aberrant behavior (investment strategies during stock market bubbles for example).
These turned out to be more fad than lasting revolution.
Unfortunately, the One World collectivist utopia envisioned by many here in the US is not a fad. It almost certainly is a factor in the increasingly vehement anti-Israeli/anti-Semitic talk, particularly on college campuses. It will take a concerted effort to debunk this nonsense.

I'm not a scientist, but I would offer that, despite the lasting revolution engendered by Einstein's theories, Newtonian mechanics is not exactly passe. Newton's laws encompass the physical principles that most of humanity uses on a daily basis. They were sufficient to put a man on the moon, Einstein's relativity being somewhat irrelevant for that endeavor, I believe. New scientific theories don't always completely supplant the old. New political theories shouldn't either.

Perhaps the US and Israel should wish Europe the best of luck with their utopian experiment, give them a few hundred years to work out the kinks, and reassess at that point whether or not it reliably prevents war and conflict. In the meantime, we stick to what has historically been shown to promote survival.

Daniel Frank

August 18, 2010

McGill University

Thank you for such a thoughtful and intelligent analysis. As support for your idea, I will add the following set of speculations. The modern, anti-nation state paradigm was formed in large part out of Western guilt over the Holocaust and an inability to encompass what it meant about ourselves and about human nature. That modern, western, enlightened people could carry out a Holocaust could not be faced head on because it meant that we all have barbarians inside of us. Other (i.e., liberal, multicultural) rationalizations must be found whereby the goodness in human nature will overcome the badness. The new paradigm must deny and disguise the fact that humans have the potential to hate and kill and this will continue on both an isolated basis and on a collective, social basis. Thus, we need police and armies to protect us and our societies and always will.

As a psychoanalyst who deals with aggression (or more particularly, defenses against it) everyday in patients on the couch, I was much impressed by John Keegan's book, "The History of Warfare" which contributed an anthropologic and historical body of support for the contention that hatred, murder and warfare is written into human nature. (Freud's idea of the death instinct continues to have support from leading thinkers in psychoanalysis, which, as you must know, has had it's own problems with paradigm shifts in the history of medicine.)

But, these musings aside, thank you again.

Harry Sterling

August 18, 2010

N/A

If, as you state, paradigm shifts are seen by many, especially in the European Union, as the key elements in the evolution of humanity, then two more paradigm shifts would seem inevitable: First, the breakdown through mixed marriages of ethnic and racial differences, leading to a society where ethnic and racial considerations and views eventually become irrelevant and Second, the end of all religions,effectively terminating the need for and existence of any single nation states, secular-based or religion-based, as in the case of Israel and countries like Iran.
In point of fact, the existence of independent nation states and institutionalized religions of whatever kind, are obstacles to realizing the flowering of human potential, a potential all peoples, including Jews, Muslims, Christians, etc., should want to contribute to.

Douglas S. Rabin

August 18, 2010

N/A

I read your letter with interest and can comment that the paradigm that matters most is that of the Torah and the recognition, as described in yesterday's daf Yomi, that we are in the throes of the Gog and Magog battle to destroy Israel and the Jews as part of the final redemption and coming of Messiah. Your quotes help us understand that:

"In Perpetual Peace, then, Kant argues that the establishment of a universal state, which will “grow until it embraced all the people of the earth,” is the only possible dictate of reason," is referring to the goal of uniting the world against Israel.

"We want to know how it can be that at some very fundamental level, the facts don’t seem to matter any more: How it can be that even where Israel is undoubtedly in the right—not to mention the inevitable cases in which Israeli leaders or soldiers have performed poorly—the country can be pilloried in campaigns of vilification that bite deeper and hit harder with every passing year," documents that when Hashem is directing the world in its activities against Israel there is no sense of order or hierarchy beyond what Hashem deems.

And finally, "On the battlefield of ideas, the state of Israel is today in danger as never before. But the danger isn’t coming from Israel’s traditional enemies and it can’t be fought using the traditional means. You can’t fight a paradigm with facts—because pretty much any facts you’ve got are either dismissed as irrelevant or absorbed into the new paradigm and reinterpreted in a way that only reinforces it. You can only fight a paradigm with a competing paradigm. And the paradigm that gave birth to Israel and which held it firm, both domestically and internationally, is today in tatters.," the only paradigm that can explain this illogical absurdity is that which the Gemara provides in showing that the war between the world united and the Jews (and as Rav Pam noted in his Hagadah, requiring the involvement of the greatest kingdom of all, the United States with Obama at is helm) is only explainable in the terms of understanding the geulah and its coming and the ultimate paradigm that we should seek, namely Torah and a life dedicated to Torah.

Wolfgang Graßmann

August 18, 2010

None

Israel Through European Eyes

Thats laughable!

Its israel through the eyes of those european leftist, who deliver our fredom to the muslims and islam.

Gregory Rodban

August 18, 2010

N/A

You have written a brilliant essay. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Now the question is what should be the policy responses to this paradigm that threatens the very existence of the Jewish state.
More that 6 years ago I published an opinion on the Arutz 7 website called "Israel and Europe" that expressed somewhat similar idea as in your essay, albeit in a much less sophisticated, coherent and refined way.
One real force that can be employed to fight the Kantian paradigm is Nationalism (not dead yet in many European countries).
I argued in my opinion piece that Jewish organizations should support nationalist forces all over Europe.
It is a risky way, no question about it, but in my opinion it carries a lot less risk than doing nothing and allowing Israel to sink in the rotten waters of the Kantian intellectual swamp.
Unfortunately I don't have the resources, connections, standing and publicity to launch a massive effort to mobilize Jewish forces for the support of constructive, positive nationalism everywhere and especially in Europe. I believe that you do. You and the Shalem Center should start this movement that will hopefully help defeat the Kantian paradigm.

Barry Alexander

August 17, 2010

N/A

Mr. Hazony: I'm inclined to agree with your hypothesis on the rejection of Israel. But I do believe there are exceptions.
In the US, there is a large group of conservatives who are firm (even rabid) believers in the nation-state, and yet are opposed to Israel. This seems to be built on two premises: First, that Israel is an illegitimate nation-state, since it was erected on a pile of dead and dispossessed Arabs. Second, that the US gets nothing out of its support for Israel. There might be more, but I've little stomach to read Pat Buchanan, so I'm not familiar with all the arguments.
The second has little relevance to your piece, and is mostly a topic for Americans to argue about (my personal belief is that there is little to be gained, and more to be lost, by throwing Israel under the bus). The first is a bit more germane. Living in a country that was built on a pile of dead and dispossessed natives, I don't give the argument a lot of time. What's done is done, and, while we might try to compensate the Indians or the Arabs, we can't go back to 1607 or 1948. The conservatives making the argument are missing the beam in their own eye.
In any case, then, there is an anti-Israel argument that emerges from the nation-state paradigm. Even if it's rather minor compared to the Israel-hatred that seethes from the internationalists, it's still there. I suppose that what I am trying to say is: don't get too caught up in a paradigm, even if you yourself have devised it. Your framework does help to make sense of this corner of American politics. God knows that Obama is nothing if not an internationalist.

Anne Julienne

August 16, 2010

None

I am writing to you as a friend of Israel, a non-Jew living in Australia. I receive the newsletter of AIJAC - The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council - which recently included a link to your letter with this description:
Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony has a new provocative and controversial essay on why he believes Europeans not only increasingly reject Israel's legitimacy but are so prone to slurring Israeli behaviour as "Nazi."

In case you are not aware of it, Australia has a prominent and shameful example of the kind of Jew hatred you refer to, a cartoon by Michael Leunig:

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/stories/images/060502_s5f1.gif (the cartoon)
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/060502_s5.htm (the context)
http://www.vakras.com/new-left-and-nazism/index.html (a later commentary)

So, here in Australia, there are at least some eyes that see things the same way as do some European eyes.

Now, I read your letter with great interest and found myself broadly agreeing with everything you wrote until Kant and then Habermas turned up. I have a great deal of respect for both authors and was dismayed at your treatment of them. I also think this is where your essay takes a wrong and ultimately fatal turn. Since I think this a pity, I thought I'd try to convey here the precise nature of my misgivings.

First, let me be more precise in my agreement. In part I, you refer to the limited effect of Israeli policy and PR on how Israel is viewed and especially on the mounting delegitimization of Israel. I agree that these two factors cannot change the tide, perhaps not even slow it down. A deeper issue needs to be found. Where I would somewhat depart from you here concerns how to label this issue and its target. I prefer to write simply of "Jew hatred". "Anti-semitism" has lost much of its sting through overuse and Muslims have more than a little justification in claiming the word for themselves as well. Also, where you focus on Israel as target I prefer to see it as three-fold: Judaism, the Jewish people, and Israel. Modern day Israel aims to be the protective homeland of the Jewish people and that people, even the atheists among them, continue to carry ancient Judaism into the world today. And really, to my mind, it is Judaism itself that is most hated. It is hated, of course, by both Christians and Muslims, but also by both theistic Christians and atheistic post-Christians. Richard Dawkins' portrait of Yahweh as "a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" is ample witness to the latter.

Coming now to your part II where you describe the work and conclusions of Thomas Kuhn, this is broadly fine with me. However, I have also read Paul Feyerabend on this subject and I tend to see scientific progress as a little more chaotic and irrational even than as portrayed by Kuhn. Also, the main theme that you've extracted from Kuhn, the idea that plain facts cannot alter an entrenched paradigm, was already foreshadowed fairly adequately by Karl Popper's notion of "theory laden" perception. We only see what our current theories allow us to see.

Now in part III you characterise the mounting delegitimization of Israel as a shifting from an old paradigm to a new. The old paradigm is the nation state as a vehicle for the self determination and self protection of a distinct people. The new paradigm is the "multinational empire", the "very epitome of despotism", the "rule of an international regime". Here you are clearly demonising the new paradigm.

At this point, you bring in Kant as the initiator of this demonic idea. I will quote you and respond in more detail from here on.

First, you quote Kant who observes that when left to themselves nation states do behave like savages, for "each state sees its own majesty" while not having to "submit to any external constraint". There is no international law here, no international agreement on what is right and what is wrong conduct.

You wrote: "For Kant, then, the hallmark of reason in politics is the willingness to give up any kind of right to act on the basis of one’s own political independence."

I disagree. Kant is not asking to give up any kind of right, only the "right" selfishly to do whatever one pleases without regard for others and without regard for mutual understandings as to what constitutes appropriate or moral behaviour.

You wrote: "This is true of the individual, when he submits to the lawful order of the political state."

Indeed, it is true of the individual. Surely you would agree that it is appropriate for the individual to "submit to the lawful order of the political state". Are you suggesting that chaotic lawlessness is preferable? All that Kant is saying is that an individual or discrete political state should not be free to do as it pleases. Like the individual person, a state should be constrained by some agreed-on international laws. It is out of this idea that we have the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the various international laws governing inter-state behaviour. Are you suggesting these are bad things?

You wrote: "And it is true of nations as well, which must in the same way give up any right to independent action and enter into an “international state” that will assume all rights respecting the use of force and the establishment of justice."

Again, there is no requirement to give up every right to independent action. Again, the "international state" - in our day the United Nations - has very very limited "rights", mainly to speak up, reprimand, and sometimes even enforce decisions regarding the moral behaviour of states. The UN does meddle in internal affairs when it comes to basic human rights and it meddles even more strongly when it comes to inter-state behaviour. The fact that today's UN is a farce is not the fault of the idea but of the application of it.

You wrote: "The supporters of the nation-state are seen as supporting a violent egoism on an international scale, which is as much an abdication of morals as the insistence of violent egoism in our personal lives."

And you don't agree with that? You think it's fine for individuals to act merely out of egoism without concern for the well being of their fellow citizens? You think it's fine for any single state to act merely out of its own interests without concern for the well being of states affected by their behaviour? Please tell me I'm reading you wrong here.

You accuse Kant of "imput[ing] an intrinsic immorality to the institution of the national state". No, that is so so wrong. It is not the state itself that is immoral, just as it is not the individual as such that is immoral. It is the state acting alone - we now call it "unilaterally" - without regard for any higher law, any higher morality. Just as the individual is morally degraded when he acts purely selfishly and without regard for any law or any ethical structure. To put this in theistic terms, that is what God is for. If God is thrown out, if God's law is abandoned, then the result is chaos and brutality whether at the individual or the state level. We can all go around killing whoever we have a mind to kill, on the whim of the moment. You can live in that world if you like. I certainly don't want it and most of humanity doesn't want it either.

You wrote: "Nazism was seen as the rotten fruit of the German nation-state, and Kant looked to have been right all along: For the nations to arm themselves, and to determine for themselves when to use these arms, was now seen as barbarism and a brutish debasement of humanity."

You wrote: "For the record, my own view is that this line of argument is preposterous."

It is only preposterous because you're exaggerating Kant's intent. You are saying that a law-abiding individual or an international-law-abiding state have lost all rights. Not at all. They have only lost the right to behave savagely.

You wrote: "The heart of the idea of the nation-state is the political self-determination of peoples."

Yes. And peoples, like individuals, have a basic right to self-determination. But not in complete isolation from their responsibilities towards their fellow citizens and states.

You wrote: " The nation-state is a form of government that limits its political aspirations to the rule of one nation, and to establishing national freedom for this nation. The Nazi state, on the other hand, was precisely the opposite of this: Hitler opposed the idea of the nation-state as an expression of Western effeteness."

OK, here we have two kinds of nation-state. One kind limits its aspirations while the other allows itself imperialist ambitions. Both are nation-states for both take care of their own people. What Hitler didn't like was the limitation, not the nation-state in itself.

You wrote: "On his view, the political fate of all nations should be determined by the new German empire that was to arise: Indeed, Hitler saw his Third Reich as an improved incarnation of what he referred to as the First Reich—which was none other than the Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs! The Nazis’ aim was thus diametrically opposed to that of the Western nation-states. Hitler’s dream was precisely to build his empire on their ruin."

Yes, and that is what a selfish psychopathic individual does that feels itself unconstrained by a higher moral law. It doesn't alter the fact that the individual is indeed an individual, nor that the German nation-state was indeed a nation-state. Hitler was voted in by his people, he served his people, he was the mouthpiece of German self-determination of the time. The fact that that self-determination was harnassed to fanatical imperial ambitions does not alter the fact of its presence and reality in the mix.

You wrote: "Obvious as this seems to me, many Europeans declined to see things this way, accepting the view that Nazism was, more or less, the nation-state taken to its ugly conclusion."

Nazism was indeed the ugly conclusion of a "Godless" nation-state. And the United Nations was an attempt to bring international standards of morality into the mix.

You now bring in Habermas and I have not read this particular writing of his. But if you've done to Habermas what you did to Kant, I can imagine that Habermas understands the difference between a selfish nation-state standing alone and a responsible nation-state submitting to some guidelines for decent behaviour both towards its own citizens (human rights) and towards other states. My letter here is largely critical but, if you show interest, I can outline my own understanding of these deeper issues, at which point I would make further reference to Habermas.

You wrote: "Be this as it may, this post-national vision found takers all over Europe. A mere generation later, in 1992, European leaders signed the Treaty of Maastricht establishing the European Union as an international government, and stripping member states of many of the powers associated historically with national independence."

You make this sound almost imperialist in tone. Europeans discussed and debated this federation of independent nation-states, they voted in their leaders, they even voted on the single issue of membership. The European Union is like a marriage or a business partnership, entered into freely by all parties. Sure, there are individuals who voted against it and don't like it but that is the reality of democracy. You get to please the majority, but very very rarely the absolute totality of the population.

You are, I think, confusing two things here. First, the European Union is not some "God" replacement as the United Nations is. It simply does not serve the function of overseeing the moral behaviour of individual member states. It is, above all, a pragmatic arrangement. Second, the EU was not born of the imperialist ambitions of any one state within (or outside) it. It is a free union. There is nothing sinister in that, nothing that undermines the best strengths of the independent nation-state.

You wrote: "Indeed, there is a powerful new paradigm abroad, which sees us doing without such states. And it has unleashed a tidal wave of consequences, for those who embrace it and for those who do not."

There is a kind of self-centred and semi-tribal nation-state that has had its day. But self-determination and self-assertion based on geographical boundaries is not about to die. Let me tell you that, as an Australian, it's not going away from here any time soon.

Onto Part IV. Yes, Britain and Holland and France are losing their identities fast. However, in my view, Bat Ye'or's concept of "Eurabia" better explains this dissolution of identity. It is not the fault of the EU as such, except insofar as the EU acts as a vehicle for accelerating the Islamization of Europe. There is a sense here of an imperialist invasion from outside but it is highly unconventional and the "conquerors" were invited in with open arms.

You wrote: "From the horror and humiliation of Auschwitz, this inescapable lesson emerged: That it was Jewish dependence on the military protection of others that had brought this about."

I'm totally with you here. Throughout the centuries of Jewish persecution in and around Europe there have often been non-Jews trying to help, a bishop offering his abbey, a nobleman his castle. But these were always too few and too little coordinated. Something more solid and secure was needed.

I totally agree with and sympathize with Ben-Gurion's call for a Jewish homeland and Jewish independence.

You wrote: "Today, most Jews continue to believe that the only thing that has really changed since those millions of our people perished—the only thing that stands as a bulwark against the repetition of this chapter in the world’s history—is Israel."

I cannot see any other way myself and yet, will Israel be enough? If Iran keeps heading toward a nuclear capability and keeps urging on its proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon, then the outlook is bleak. For if Israel launches a preemptive attack then it risks being shunned by the international community. And like it or not, Israel does need that community to some extent. It's not the complete reliance of old, but still ... it really is hard to see Israel doing this quite alone.

You wrote: "it is not Israel that is the answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union"

I disagree, not only that this is the case but that this is the underlying perception behind current Jew hatred. It is not the job of the EU to contain a selfish or emperialist nation-state, it is the job of the UN. And the UN is failing dismally at this, constantly targeting Israel and ignoring states with far worse records of human rights abuse and military violence.

You now present your competing paradigms A and B, the one focussing on Jewish vulnerability and the other on German irresponsibility. Within this context, I don't see any chasm or great difference between A and B. The one looks at the victim, the other at the perpetrator, that is all.

You next replace Auschwitz with Israel. However, while you use exactly the same words in the rest of the sentence for paradigm B, you reverse the meaning entirely in the sentence for paradigm A. If you had translated the two paradigms equally, the first would have appeared as something like:

Paradigm A: Israel represents the unspeakable horror of Palestinian women and men standing empty-handed and naked, watching their children die for want of a rifle with which to protect them.

This is clearly idiotic.

Also, in the representation of paradigm B, most sensible people in the world understand that Israel is indeed backed by something other than their own government's views. Israel is constantly bending over backwards to appease the US in particular and Britain, France, and many other countries around the world that stand, at least in theory, as Israel's friend. Australia is certainly one of them. So Israel is backed by many friends, sometimes in a lukewarm way but overall the backing is solid. There was nothing like that for Nazi Germany.

So again, I neither agree with this perception nor would I attribute it to the Jew haters.

These two versions of paradigm A and B are not mirror images or direct transpositions. In the end they are merely paradigms A and B and C and D. The first three are completely compatible. Only the fourth stands apart and cries out for an explanation. As neat as this formula might appear, it is not an explanation.

As this section is central to your argument, I will elaborate and try to clarify further.

I will refer to Paradigms A and B as Narratives V(ictim) and P(erpetrator).

These narratives fit together as hand to glove. There can be no hunted without a hunter, no killed without a killer, no victim without a perpetrator.

Your transposed Paradigms A and B become Narratives D(efender) and A(ggressor).

These narratives no longer fit together because they were transposed differently. Your paradigm A was transposed by altering the action while retaining the actors, whereas your paradigm B was transposed by altering the actors while retaining the action. After the transposition, Jews are the only actors but they are acting A) defensively and B) aggressively. Defense is acceptable, aggression is not.

Unfortunately, to people with little understanding of military matters, preemptive aggression (as in 1967) is not justified as defense. Similarly, a brief but massive conventional military assault (Gaza War) is seen as aggressive rather than as part of a defensive strategy against unconventional rocket attacks occurring over several years. Media bias also plays a part as the first makes for good news coverage while the latter is boring. The defensive side of the narrative is played down while the aggressive side is highlighted.

None of this has anything substantial to do with the inherent merits or otherwise of nation-states.

You now introduce a proud Dutchman and ask the reader: "Try to see this through European eyes".

But I cannot see it as you describe it. The Dutchman is not losing his identity to the EU but to Islam. And it is Islam and not Kant that demands the more complete sacrifice of self identity and self determination that you attribute to this poor philosopher. And the Dutchman is not letting go for noble reasons but mostly because he can't be bothered to see what's happening for himself. Only a Geert Wilders has his eyes fully open.

There is a deep deep Jew hatred fatally embedded within Islam, clearly evident in the Koran itself but abounding in all its distasteful detail throughout the additional Islamic texts. The Nazis found resonance there and exploited it. Today's Muslims find resonance in Mein Kampf and feed on it furiously.

What you see today in Europe is a linking of hands between an only very thinly buried Christian version of Jew hatred and a newly arrived, very open and brazen Muslim version of Jew hatred. The one emboldens the other and the fires burn apace.

You have the Dutchman say: "The Jews! Those Jews, who should have been the first to welcome the coming of the new order, the first to welcome the coming of mankind’s salvation, instead establish themselves as its opponents, building up their own selfish little state, at war with the world."

No, no, not at all. It was the Jews who first found salvation in the new order as expressed in the UN (and not the EU). It was that order that gave birth to Israel. If Jews now seem to be opposing some order, not in the world but in Europe, then that order is Islam's.

The Dutchman: "How dare they? Must they not make the same sacrifices as I in the name of reason and good?"

No, no, not at all. The Jew is daring to hold on to Jerusalem. And the Dutchman's sacrifice is not in the name of reason and good but in the name of Allah.

You wrote: "In Europe and wherever else the new paradigm has spread, the comparison with Nazism, sickening and absurd though it may be, is as natural and inevitable as mud after rain."

The sickening comparison is made indeed but it is not about nationalism. It is about another dying paradigm, the one you're failing to see, the one that Huntington has identified. The dying paradigm of Marxism, socialism, communism, that utopian world in which there is no longer a "mine" and a "yours".

Why has Israel, in particular, sinned here? Because it started out with those lovely kibbutzim and now it has Lieberman who knows better where communism leads. Israeli men and women carry rifles, yes, but far far worse than that, they carry a creative confidence and an incredible survival against odds. They even know how to laugh at their misfortunes. And most of all, they are so alive as to be deeply deeply sickening to the half-dead who hate them. (It's worth recalling Sartre's analysis as Mansur does here: http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/08/13/15017636.html)

You wrote: "The answer is that while hatred for Israel may, at a given moment, be focused quite sincerely on certain facts about the security zone or the Gaza Strip or the Turkish blockade runners, the trajectory of international disgust or hatred for Israel is just not driven by any of these facts. It is driven by the rapid advance of a new paradigm that understands Israel, and especially the independent Israeli use of force to defend itself, as illegitimate down to its foundations."

I don't think you're digging deep enough here. The Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, not because of some Kantian distaste for nation-states, but because the Jews represent a refusal to accept the new paradigms of Christianity and then of Islam. They have refused to "progress".

You ask: "isn’t it the case that people who subscribe to this paradigm are going to be coming to the conclusion that Israel has no right to exist and should be dismantled?"

Whether you couch it as Israel=Auschwitz or I couch it as Israel=Refusal, either way, it does come down to the dismantling of Israel.

And so to part V, where you write that Israel will fall "by way of words" and this I do agree with.

You wrote: "You can only fight a paradigm with a competing paradigm. And the paradigm that gave birth to Israel and which held it firm, both domestically and internationally, is today in tatters."

But Israel has two parents here: the United Nations that granted it legitimacy and a resurgent Jewish instinct for self-preservation following Auschwitz. The UN has been useless in almost every other way and at most times since 1947 but it was there at the inception. And the UN is partly what Kant meant, it is a part of his "Three Definitive Articles" providing a foundation for peace: "The civil constitution of every state should be republican"; "The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states"; and "The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality".

The trouble with the UN is that it is not constituted of republics (or democracies as we'd call them today), it is not a federation of free states working toward world peace. Rather, it is a debased platform for political game playing, a vehicle for Jew hatred through constant Israel bashing. It has become a monster in its turn. Not because Kant got things so very very wrong but because he has not been properly understood.

You then wrote: "What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in college. If you’re used to academic books, it’s an easy read. And if not, it’s a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a clearer insight into what’s happening to Israel today in the international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in Israel’s universities."

And: "After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed."

Here is where you've made a fatal error. Do reread Kuhn yourself. Where does a scientific revolution ever entail the rebuilding of an old paradigm that has collapsed? Science is always about progress, it is always about the new pushing aside the old. Science itself, as a paradigm, will not allow you to hold on to a collapsing paradigm. I happen to think your analysis is in error but even if it is correct, the rational conclusion is that you must learn to live with the new paradigm or expect your children to live with it once your generation has died out (as Planck and Darwin gloomily predicted for their own new paradigms).

Kuhn is great on science but not on politics or religion. For politics, it is better to think in terms of alternative narratives. In that case the "Israel is Auschwitz" narrative is ripe for removal but the right words must be found. And for that, a right understanding must be developed, one that digs deep enough to reach foundational issues. As for religion, you have a great narrative and books containing an indestructible authority. You don't need talk of paradigms to preserve that. However, books die without the people to love them and that indestructible authority wants the Jewish people continuing alive and well in all their peculiar distinctiveness and distinction.

Stephen Amsel

August 15, 2010

N/A

I read your article and review of Kuhn's work and found it to be highly enlightening. Thank you.

There are, however, two points which either you missed or dismissed for reasons which are not immediately apparent to me. Between 1939 and 1945, European Jews and the majority of Europeans experienced very different catastrophes, respectively the Holocaust and World War II.
Jews responded to oppression of minorities and its ultimate expression, genocide, while most Europeans responded to war. Also, Europeans today are on far better terms with each other than are Middle Easterners. A politically united Europe with disarmed states would not get the people of any nation voted to death. The same would not be true of a similarly united Middle East.

Rather than respond to the same events through two opposed paradigms, it seems they may have responded to two different events and conditions. Therefore the mutually exclusive responses do not necessarily imply mutually exclusive paradigms. For example, both responses would could come from the same paradigm, one where a balance must be struck between organization and anarchy to avoid both chaotic war and tyrannical oppression. Both their different experiences in
1939-1945 and their different relations with their neighbours would lead each to believe the current system must be adjusted in different directions. Unless I have erred, this leaves open the question of whether there are really opposed paradigms, or "just" a conflation of WWII and the Holocaust combined with a lack of consideration of vastly different political climates.

Thank you again for your enlightening article.

Abraham Berkowitz and Tom A. Milstein

August 15, 2010

None

Yoram Hazony’s essay, has had a substantial impact on Jewish political opinion both in and out of Israel. Hazony certainly deserves credit for presenting a significantly original perspective on the so-called Delegitimation crisis now facing Israel. It deserves the widest possible circulation.

And yet it is dangerously flawed. We wish to point out these flaws in the context of expressing our overall appreciation of Hazony’s contribution, which opens new pathways for understanding Israel’s current predicament even as it closes off consideration of the necessary steps which the Jewish state must take to overcome the dilemmas he so eloquently describes.

Hazony’s essay is deeply indebted to the ideas of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. This approach is itself rather novel in conservative and neoconservative thinking, which has not previously been noted for its sympathy with Kuhn’s remarkable sociological analysis of scientific thought. Conservatives have tended to dismiss it as an early expression of postmodern “deconstructionism” – and as such, a pernicious influence on Western intellectual development. Hazony instead offers this glowing description of Kuhn’s
book,
… the most influential academic book of the last half century, selling over a million copies in a dozen languages. Kuhn’s book dropped a depth charge under the foundations of academic thinking about the way we search for truth, and about the way we come to believe the things we believe. And although the subject of the book is the way the search for truth works in the physical sciences, it has implications well beyond the sciences.

Kuhn describes the “progress of science” as taking place not as a steady, incremental advance in mankind’s knowledge of nature, but through a series of “paradigm shifts,” each of which produces what he calls a “scientific revolution.” In between these revolutions, science does proceed in an incremental, step-by-step fashion, locked into the reigning paradigm, which not only supplies a coherent perspective on nature, but also a regnant definition of the very nature of science. Until a revolution disrupts their sense of certainty, most scientists are not even aware of operating under a paradigm. It is only when paradoxes arise that cannot be adequately explained under the old paradigm, stimulating “geniuses” like Copernicus, Newton or Einstein to present alternative paradigms, that this awareness emerges. Even then, scientists trained under the old paradigm tend to reject the new. Since paradigms define the very nature of the factual, they find themselves unable to comprehend even the terminology, much less the advantages, offered by the new paradigm. As Hazony quotes Kuhn,
The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case…. [Thus while] each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing…, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved
by proofs.

As a result, actual paradigm shifts must often await the generational shift that occurs when the older generation of scientists dies out and is replaced by their younger, presumably more open-minded juniors.

Hazony invokes Kuhn in order to throw light upon a subject that has vexed many of Israel’s supporters, both left and right: why Israel is subjected to one campaign after another “of vilification in the media and on the campuses and in the corridors of power—a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis. “We know we will again see our nation treated not as a democracy doing its duty to defend its people and its freedom, but as some kind of a scourge.” He notes that while the left and the right differ in their responses to these campaigns – the left emphasizing policy changes, the right better PR efforts – the overwhelming evidence is that neither of these two approaches has the slightest effect in changing the minds of those who mount these campaigns, and those who are influenced by them. This impotence prevails despite the tremendous weight of factual evidence gathered by Israel’s supporters disproving the allegations upon which the campaigns are based.

According to Hazony, the reason for this abject failure lies in a tremendous paradigm shift which, unnoticed in Israel, has overtaken public opinion in Western Europe, where most of the anti-Israel sentiment has its home. He argues that it is this paradigm shift, not traditional European anti-Semitism, or even the influence of Arab petrodollars, which accounts for Israel’s political isolation and progressive delegitimation.

In order to grasp the significance of a paradigm shift, one must first understand the nature of the paradigm which has been replaced. Hazony argues that Europe’s old paradigm – which it bequeathed to the world (including Israel) – was based on nationalism. Nationalism is the ideological paradigm of the international system which arose in Europe simultaneously with the emergence of the nation-state:
The defeat of the universalist ideal in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 led to the establishment of a new paradigm for European politics—one in which a revitalized concept of the national state held the key to the freedom of peoples throughout Europe. By the late-1800s, this idea of national liberty had been extended to the point that it was conceived not only as a governing principle for
Europe, but for the entire world. Progressives such as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson championed the sovereign nation-state, which would have the right to defend its form of government, laws, religion and language against the tyranny of imperial actors, as the cornerstone of what was ultimately to be a new political order for humanity. Herzl’s Zionist Organization, which proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish people, fit right into this political understanding—and indeed, it was under British sponsorship that the idea of the Jewish state grew to fruition. In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third World.

According to Hazony, the “new paradigm for European politics” launched in 1648 was subjected to a vigorous philosophical assault by Immanuel Kant in a 1795 essay entitled Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. Kant denied that the nation-state could be the basis of a moral world order, since the selfish sovereign claims of such states would always conflict with the universal need for global peace and harmony. A single international state must emerge, abolishing individual national sovereignties and bringing all of mankind under its purview.

Kant’s visionary Sketch was relegated to the realm of the utopian by most Western thinkers, until the carnage of two world wars came to be seen as a result of nationalism run amok by many influential political intellectuals, especially but not only in Europe. Although not openly declared as their objective, the Kantian program of an international state deriving its authority from the demolished sovereignties of formerly independent nations has become a sort of hidden European agenda in world affairs. This hidden agenda is the paradigm shift which has stealthily washed the solid nationalist ground out from under Israel’s Zionist foundations. Not Israel as a Jewish state, not even Israel as an allegedly colonialist imposition, but Israel as a sovereign nation-state represents an unacceptable affront to this new paradigm, since no realistic proposal for peace in the region can be devised which does not involve sovereignty concessions by Israel – but no such concessions can be offered by Israel which do not involve the eventual sacrifice of her national existence. Europe’s peoples, who have already conceded much of their own national sovereignties, simply cannot see what Israel’s problem is with such concessions.

The obvious problem with Hazony’s analysis is that it leaves Israel sealed within a coffin with “NO EXIT” signs prominently engraved on all 6 interior surfaces. If there has indeed been a “paradigm shift” in European and (since the election of Obama) American politics, and this paradigm shift has left Israel stranded in a realm of 19th and 20th Century nation-states even as the rest of the world has rushed beyond nationalism into the heady new world of Kantian political globalism, then Israel is well and truly doomed by the iron dialectic of Kuhn’s scientific revolutions. All the academic writings of the think tanks, all the military prowess of the IDF, all the political gyrations of the government, all the economic miracles of Israeli business, are not going to put the Humpty-Dumpty of national sovereignty back together again in such a world.
Israel will be illegitimated by the new paradigm of international relations. And since Hazony has already conceded that Israel’s legitimacy was conferred from above, that is, by the “international community” such as it existed under the “old paradigm,”

Let’s begin with the old paradigm, which is the one that granted Israel its legitimacy in the first place. The modern state of Israel was founded, both constitutionally and in terms of the understanding of the international community, as a nation-state, the state of the Jewish people….
….In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third World.

neither Hazony nor Israel is equipped to argue that this community is unqualified to deny legitimacy under the operation of the “new paradigm.” After all, the right of the “international community” under the old paradigm to confer legitimacy was highly dubious; such powers belong to sovereign entities, and no international organization, including the United Nations, claimed the rights of sovereignty. If legitimacy nonetheless descends upon a fledgling state from the supranational realm, then how much more credible is such a descent – or its denial – when that realm has begun to acquire some of the attributes of sovereignty which hitherto it lacked? In short, if we argue that the UN General Assembly’s 2/3 vote legitimated Israel’s existence as a sovereign state, then why, constitutionally speaking, cannot the same mechanism be employed under the new paradigm to deprive Israel of that legitimacy?

The problem with Hazony’s coffin is that it is constructed out of the materials of Western Civilization rather than those provided by our own Jewish tradition. It needs to be turned from a coffin into a platform. To do so, we need only realize one thing: the 1648 paradigm shift which Hazony describes as legitimating the modern international system never occurred. The European system of international relations that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a grand compromise between the Protestant and Catholic nations of Christian Europe. This compromise was carried out not to realize but to avoid a “paradigm shift” – the shift which the Protestant reformation had been struggling for over a century to achieve. The architects of the Roman Catholic counterreformation were well aware of what that shift would have meant (in many cases, more aware than their Protestants opponents): the “Judaization” of Christianity, or, in Kuhn’s terminology, a religious revolution.

The core of this revolution was expressed in Protestantism’s devotion to the “Old Testament,” to Talmudic and other Judaic sources for its interpretation, and to a fundamental rejection of the sacrament-dispensing role of the Church’s clerical bureaucracy. But the Reformation sued for peace before it could achieve this program. Except for a few marginal denominations like the Unitarians, it was never able to surrender its allegiance to the pagan man-God savior figure of Jesus and to its accompanying Trinitarian theology which so deeply corrupted Judaism’s monotheist
worldview. Protestantism settled for Catholic recognition of its hegemony in the lands
which its princes had conquered; the Church congratulated itself for having saved the most fundamental principle of Christianity and hoped for a better day when it might yet triumph. Out of this stalemated Christian schism, there emerged those twin symbols of the disgrace of religion: the all-powerful secular state, and the Enlightenment – and a de facto international system based on expediency rather than legitimacy.

It is the illegitimacy of the international system, the fact that the paradigm shift which Hazony thinks occurred in 1648 was actually strangled in its cradle, that is the curse of the modern world. Our nation did not win its independence in the U.N. It won its independence in the same place every legitimate nation wins theirs: in a revolutionary war of independence. Ben Gurion and his minions downplayed that fact because it reflected too much credit on the Irgun and Menachem Begin. But the fact is that the international system has no legitimacy to confer or deny. It is a realm of anarchy, governed only by the law of the jungle. Its “authority” is fictitious.

The current attack on the nation-state is real, but it is not revolutionary. It is counterrevolutionary in the truest sense of that word, nothing less than the recrudescence of the unitary imperial principle in world affairs, and as such represents the failure of the Protestant paradigm shift to take place, not its revolutionary overthrow. Its aim is to build a second Tower of Babel, and the tools which it will find it necessary to employ in this endeavor are both anti-Semitic and totalitarian.

If the rise of Naziism was insufficient to mark the end of Judaism’s deadly love affair with Western Civilization, then surely the West’s shameful abandonment of its own highest institutional creation – the modern democratic nation-state – in a calculated act of revenge against its own Jewish roots, ought to be sufficient. The question is, will our best intellectuals, scholars, and political thinkers be able to meet the challenge which this repudiation has set? Yoram Hazony’s essay suggests that the first step – recognition – has been taken. But what next?

Richard Gumpert

August 15, 2010

IDC

Very interesting theory, and although I do not see all the European nation-states going entirely the way of the EU (indeed, the recent financial troubles may further delay the trend and cause some rethinking), I agree with you whole-heartedly – and broken-heartedly.

Your article made me hearken back to a paragraph in Herman Wouk’s “A Will to Live On”

Shortly after the Six-Day War, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said to his ambassador returning to Washington, “You have a hard job now, you have to represent a nebbish Samson.” … The whole present Jewish image problem is there in Eshkol’s sardonic oxymoron. What sort of Jew lives among the nations today, anyway? The nebbish Eternal Wanderer who docilely climbed into the German trains, or the New Jew manning the formidable Israeli air force and tank columns?

At page 27. Mr. Wouk takes the issue no further, treating it perhaps as a PR issue. Unfortunately, we live in an episodic world, and PR – along with our belief in what is right according to our paradigm – is what we cling to (and point to in order to influence others) when the news breaks. So until we can influence a new generation to understand the world as we do, we have the obligation to defend ourselves with “rifle in hand” and intelligent PR.

Thomas Rid

August 15, 2010

University of Constance

I read this today between the meetings I had. And I think there are a few points where I actually do not agree. I think the nation state in Europe, contrary to the way you line it out, is alive and kicking. Just look at how Merkel managed the Greek debt crisis. Or at the Afghanistan engagements of various countries. Or how France and Germany and the Netherlands and others elect their leaders (and at the constantly falling participation rate in Europe-wide elections). Or at Britain's deeply rooted skepticism of all things emanating from Brussels. Or at national political debates on, really, anything (they stop at the border, mostly). Or at the lacking integration in critical areas like defense and foreign policy. I worked in major policy think tanks and universities in Berlin, Paris, and London, and my personal experience there very much confirms this. I would say it is dangerous to take the statements of some left-leaning professors who never descend from their ivory tower at face value -- just in the same way this is the case here and in the U.S. No European country (even Belgium), rest assured, will disappear as a national and sovereign entity any time soon -- even if some of that sovereignty is pooled. And there are many reasons for this, language, history, deep identity first among them. But also a rapidly spreading popular view in Europe that integration has its limits.

I also think that, from an up-close perspective, Europe is not as uniformly anti-Israel as you imply. I just had a highly interesting conversation about this with Eran Lerman. He was preparing Netanyahu's trip to Greece tomorrow. And he said that Eastern Europe, generally, has an easier time to understand Israel, partly because they are in general skeptical of all former Soviet allies, including the Palestinians (his argument). And Southern Europe more and more understands that the Middle East's problems "don't start and don't end" with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; a major shift is happening, he thought, and relations are rapidly improving, not getting worse. Even within countries like Germany and the UK you have a very large number of people who are staunchly pro-Israeli. People like me are not alone. Again, those on the left are usually louder and shriller, but I think it would be a mistake to just take them by their word.

Jonathan Colvin

August 14, 2010

None

As a Kuhnian myself (in terms of philosophy of science), it's an interesting analysis, but essentially IMO a fallacious one. Fallacious not in its identification of Kuhnian processes in international relations, but fallacious in its identification of the paradigms involved; to whit: "Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of German soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own government’s views as to their national rights and interests."

By this analysis, we would expect to see a national repudiation in Great Britain of, for example, the Battle of Britain; or in France a repudiation of the French resistance. But we see nothing of the sort. There remains in Europe as a whole (perhaps not so much in Germany, for good historical reason), a strong sense that "Good Wars" are possible, because for most "War" means "World War II", the quintessential "Good war". If there is a paradigm shift that applies to the case of Israel, it is more likely to be a sense that the ethnic nation-state is an anachronism. You may have a few scattered far-right parties insisting that "Britain should remain British" or decrying the Islamization or brown-skinned takeover of this or that nation, but by and large the majority of Europeans are accepting of multiculturalism. Insofar as Israel is the quintessential ethnic nation-state, it is this paradigm shift that it runs afoul of.

Sara Eisen

August 11, 2010

N/A

I believe your ‘paradigm of paradigms ‘ tells a very significant part of the story, and I thank you for a lucid and convincing presentation. I do believe you got it right on Israel.But it is, after all, not all about us. What about Palestine? That is to say: Why do most of the proponents of a nation-less world still frothily support a Palestinian state even as they would dismantle the Jewish one tomorrow on Kantian grounds? Also, why do most of these Universalists fully embrace, or at least rarely oppose, radical Islam, which holds some of the most parochial, particularistic, national-deterministic views there are… and espouses them regularly, loudly, violently?If the paradigms you mention were the whole story, radical Islam would be having issues in Europe from the left; instead, it encounters resistance most often from the right.There must be some other paradigm at work here, as well, which deftly obscures for these Kant fans the human rights abuses and rampant misogyny in the Arab world, and the fact that nearly every freedom that Europeans hold dear is forbidden or mocked by the Islamic extremists they so often admire. (Not to mention the oft-expressed Islamic desire towards pan-national Arab expansionism….the very kind of place, as you point out, that the history of national self-determination began, in resistance…) Reading your piece, I get why Europe hates the victim / aggressor Isaac. I do not get why Europe loves, or is at least able to blissfully ignore, aggressive / expansionist Ishmael. Something else is going on.I am left wanting another eleven pages from you, which deal with this. I hope it is not too much to ask.

Eric Danis

August 11, 2010

N/A

I enjoyed your interesting article about Israel's delegitimization. There was one issue that I thought the article failed to address, however: if modern man is so opposed to nationalism and the nation-state, why is there such widespread support for the formation of a Palestinian state? Thank you for the interesting article.

Jan Morup

August 11, 2010

N/A

I just read your article.
You address the issue of legitimacy for Israel as viewed from Europe. As a Danish citizen who is neither anti-Semitic nor questions Israel's right to exist I would like to point out what I consider rather problematic lines of reasoning and omissions in your text. You write

" Indeed, Hitler saw his Third Reich as an improved incarnation of what he referred to as the First Reich—which was none other than the Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs! The Nazis’ aim was thus diametrically opposed to that of the Western nation-states."

You of course have the right to question whether Nazi Germany constitutes a proper 'nation state.' I fail to see that such questioning that makes much sense. It's philosophy was extremely nationalistic by most definitions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism It was dedicated to the violent pursuit of 'Germanic interests,' as understood by the Nazis, without regard to morality, law compassion or humanity. I think you are mistaken to consider Nazism the opposite of nationalism; it is better understood as the most rabid form thereof in contemporary history.

You are indisputably right that some view Israel as a new heir to the third reich. In fact I just lost a friendship recently, in part because my friend viewed Israel as a 'Nazi state' which I found to be representative of our many differences of a political, philosophical and personal nature. I should state that she was a Republican American rather than Social Democratic European. But I would argue (and hope) that this view of Israel is still a fringe phenomenon. I find distasteful your generalizations over 'Europeans' who think this or say that you generalize as much about Europeans as anti-Semites do about Jews:

"Imagine his (presumably a European?) shock: “The Jews! Those Jews, who should have been the first to welcome the coming of the new order, the first to welcome the coming of mankind’s salvation, instead establish themselves as its opponents, building up their own selfish little state, at war with the world. How dare they? Must they not make the same sacrifices as I in the name of reason and good? Are they so debased they cannot remember their own parents in Auschwitz? No, they cannot remember—for they’ve been seduced and perverted by the same evil that had previously seized our neighbors in Germany. They have gone over to the side of Auschwitz.”"

But this is where I find your article wanting: you write about the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. I have no problem with that. But what exactly do you mean by 'Jewish state.' Technically, Denmark is a Christian state (there is an official state church) but, ravings about cartoons and other issues notwithstanding, that does not mean that Denmark discriminates against Muslim, Buddhist (mostly of Vietnamese heritage), atheist or Jewish citizens. They have EQUAL rights with their Christian compatriots. If an equivalent to this is what you mean by 'Jewish state', frankly, no problemo. But, if on the other hand, you mean a state where non-Jewish citizens are discriminated against, well I do have a problem with that. It would be unjust, bigoted and unsustainable, my friend. Both as a fundamental truth and as a practical issue, being Jewish and being Israeli are not equivalent. A sustainable state must allow for a non-Jewish citizen to be every bit as 'Israeli' as the Chief Rabbi.
This leads, somewhat indirectly perhaps, to the question of whether Israel is an 'apartheid state.' I do not consider it an apartheid state exactly because the occupation of the West Bank is temporary and, for now, probably a security necessity for Israel. Your failure to address settlements and the tragic occupation of the West Bank, in an article on European views of Israeli legitimacy strongly suggests that you do not, to use your own language, use an appropriate or sufficient paradigm through which to consider this matter. Settlements in the West Bank are deeply immoral, unlawful from the point of view of international law and most legal scholars, and does affect Israel's legitimacy adversely. Why? Because it is not Israeli land (I do not agree with Biblical or religious justifications for grabbing land) and it suggests that the occupation, in the eyes of settlers and others, may be more than temporary in nature. If this turned out to be the case, Israel would indeed be an apartheid state unless it gave full citizen rights to all occupants of these territories. Settlements therefore, are the most counter-productive policy imaginable for Israel. Moreover, they are very dangerous to the Jewish people there. To understand how I arrived at that conclusion, let us look at the world today: You do not trust Europe to help and protect Israel. Very well, I can understand that although many Europeans are more sympathetic to the plights of Israelis than you give them credit for. But Israel's protector, the USA, is not doing too well either:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1&hp
God knows (if I may be permitted that phrase as an agnostic) I do not wish for America's decline but what if America's current fiscal and military problems are here to stay for a while? History suggests that it unjustly and regrettably is a risk factor to be Jewish so you need to think long-term to avoid disasters. Do you think America will forever support a state that holds a people in virtual bondage in the occupied territories? For crying out loud, Israel is losing support among liberal JEWS in America. It will not sustain it from the gentile majority if it does not remain a democracy, much less if America itself feels increasingly strained and powerless. Do you think Israel can sustain itself without American support? Dream on: it cannot. Look at Israel's neighbors and the dominant rising power, China. Your neighbors hate you. They may continue to do so but they certainly will if you try to oppress Palestinians in perpetuity. And China has no emotional connection to the Shoa. China will neither attack nor protect you. They want natural resources, which your enemies have and you do not. Do you see where this could lead? Another butchering of Jews, this time in 'Palestine, formerly known as Israel,' as hateful neighbors rush to help their aggrieving co-religionists while the rest of the world, including a relatively less powerful West, tends to its many other headaches. This is not an imminent nightmare, to be sure. It IS time to consider how to avoid this calamity.
Of course, you could keep the land and grant full citizen rights to all lwho live there. I have no philosophical problem with that but, trying to look out for Jewish interests in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, I would advise against this. I am trying here to look out for your grandchildren's safety rather than yours. Israel desperately needs to find some form of accommodation with it's neighbors and especially with the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. If it fails to do so, there is every reason to expect that the current trajectory of the world will make it insanely dangerous to Jews in Israel. Settlements prevent such an accommodation, or in the case that it cannot be had, prevents Israel from winning sympathy. Your country needs the moral high ground perhaps more than any other country and giving up this under the pretext "we can't make peace with the Palestinians" or, much worse, "God gave the Israelites this land (the West Bank)" is immoral and dangerous to future generations of Jews in the Middle East. Because they prevent an end to the occupation and enrage millions, if not billions, settlements in the occupied territories conceivably increase the risk of another Shoa and that is exactly why they are supremely immoral and must be stopped. If you wish to discuss European views of Israel, the settlements, my friend, is the place to start.

Orit Arfa

August 6, 2010

N/A

I very much enjoyed your article! It gave me inspiration to move ahead with my novel. Books are the way, I agree.

Incidentally, The Dawn had a great influence on my novel, since it's a modernization of the Book of Esther (hence the power of books). B"H it will be complete by the end of the year.

Brandon Honeycutt

August 5, 2010

N/A

Very interesting and enlightening piece. Unfortunately for Israel this paradigm of a new world order that might include descriptions as you have laid out was largely put into place (funded in New York and taught by elitest universities) by the northeastern liberal Jewish establishment in America and other sister universities in Europe. A counteractive strategy would be to change the thinking of this powerbase in America first. The challenge would be for this northeastern establishment to embrace willingly or indirectly the areas of the country that support Israel the most now; midwest and southeastern United States as regions. Some derivative of this generic strategy combined with more effective control of communications friendly to Israel is needed. Less CNN and maybe another moderate version of Fox with funding from conservatives who still believe in the Nation State as the correct paradigm.

Great piece. Now how to educate the American Jews to believe the Nation State is a better paradigm then the New World Order?

Dov Green

August 1, 2010

N/A

I think that your argument has the following weakness: Why are the folks who are arguing for post-nationalism when it comes to Israel the very same folks who are championing the need for a Palestinian State? I don’t recall seeing anyone who is questioning Israel’s rights (to self-defense, to exist) calling on the Palestinians to relinquish their national-political aspirations. Seems that your model only fits the data in one direction.

G. Murphy Donovan

July 31, 2010

USAF (R)

Your 14 July analysis was sobering indeed. On this side of the pond we have often thought of Israel as the "canary in the coal mine." That metaphor may have to be changed to "sacrificial" lamb. The convergence of the Islamic right and the Western left is indeed an alarming development. Its also fairly clear that the Persians see the next three years as an unprecedented opportunity to do what incompetent Arabs have found impossible in the last 60 years. Indeed, nuclear weapons in the hands of the Shia provide the opportunity for Tehran to at once; assume the vanguard against Israel and vault to a leadership position in the Ummah.

I'm not sure Kuhn is or was as influential as you believe, but he certainly did inflate the rhetorical value of "paradigm." Charles Pierce (The Fixation of Belief) made similar arguments in the late 19th Century when the ability to communicate those ideas was confined to philosophy seminars. Nonetheless, your analysis of the European view and the Israeli dilemma is excellent and timely.

This article seems to me to be looking at things, in certain respects, in extremist terms, as either all white or all black, thereby missing important subtleties. Either one supports independent nation-states or one wants the complete dissolution of nation-states. While there may be some people wanting the latter, I don't think that is what is behind most of the movements toward more integration between nation-states. It is rather a desire to have them work more cooperatively. That can be done without dissolving the nation-state. And, at any rate, I think public opinion is moving, even in Europe, more against such schemes rather than towards them. Do the French, who just outlawed the burqa, want to give up their sovereignty for a world government? Or the Dutch, who are upset with Muslims in their midst? And Europe has essentially rejected Turkey’s bid to join it – this is a move away from the idea of a world government. Even the idea of a united Europe is on the wane. Getting the Euro accepted was not easy, and now, with the world economic crisis, the future of the Euro is in trouble. Having a common currency has made it difficult for the various nations of Europe with their very different economic situations to respond flexibly to the crisis. Just one more nail in the coffin of the idea of a Europe without nation-states.

The movement towards cooperative agreements will not end (and shouldn't). But the idea of eliminating nation-states is a pipe-dream of a few people (mainly some intellectuals and bureaucrats) who are, anyway, being marginalized by circumstances out of their control.

At one point, you say, "Today, most Jews continue to believe that the only thing that has really changed since those millions of our people perished—the only thing that stands as a bulwark against the repetition of this chapter in the world’s history—is Israel."

This isn't even true. I'm sure some Jews, even many do. But I doubt most do - esp. not young ones. I think you are really talking of an older generation, more like my parents, and maybe a few in my generation (I’m 57) as well. My father used to talk of how it could happen again, even here in America. He didn't say Israel stands as a bulwark against it, but you could see how someone else with such a sentiment might think that. Paradigms are changing, and thinking of Israel purely in terms of the Holocaust is on the wane.

I think that when one starts thinking of things in terms of over-arching paradigms, it becomes easy to miss nuances and end up representing facts as belonging to one or another big paradigm, so that subtleties are lost. As I said, one can support greater cooperation between nation-states, and even agreeing to obey rulings by international bodies (like the UN, for example) without imagining that one is condoning giving up all sovereignty. But such subtleties are lost if one thinks only in terms of sovereignty versus dissolution of the nation-state. Every fact becomes a sign of one or the other viewpoint, with more subtle viewpoints lost in the haze thereby created.

However, does the idea of dissolving the nation-state, an idea that admittedly has existed and exists in some quarters in Europe, have anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian situation? I would note that the sympathy for the Palestinians isn't a rejection of the nation-state but just the opposite - it is the sense that the Palestinians need their own self-determining state. No one is talking about a pan-Arab greater state of the Middle East. If anything, recognizing the Palestinians as just Arabs as opposed to their own, unique "nation" would undercut some of their claims to Palestine. So even if the destruction of the nation-state paradigm is the way the world is going (and it isn't), sympathy for Palestinians isn't part of it.

Let's consider the following excerpt from the article:

On this view, the death camps provide the ultimate proof of the evil that results from permitting nations to decide for themselves how to dispose of the military power in their possession. The obvious conclusion is that it was wrong to give the German nation this power of life and death. If such evil is to be prevented from happening again and again, the answer must be in the dismantling of Germany and the other national states of Europe, and the yoking together of all the European peoples under a single international government.

The 2nd sentence begins with, "The obvious conclusion is". That is not true. All that is implied is that one should not permit nation-states to decide completely on their own how to use their military power. This is in-line, to take a contemporary example, with Obama's emphasis of working together with other nations and not all on America's own. Does that idea of Obama's imply that nations should be dissolved? Of course not.

Now, on the basis of this incorrect leap of logic, you go on to see the differences over Israel that exist in Europe (and the world everywhere?) in terms of how one views whether Israel is a defense of Jews against the evils of the world or an oppressor. But these are not even incompatible ideas. One could see Israel as a defense of Jews and as acting inappropriately in some ways as an oppressor of certain others. Getting back to my line of logic above, seeing Israel as an oppressor of Palestinians is not incompatible with the idea of nation-states. It can, in fact, only make sense if you think the Palestinians are a nation - otherwise, why not send them to Jordan or Saudi Arabia?

I think all the talk in this article about Auschwitz is very telling. You remain caught up in the idea, the paradigm, if you will, that the Holocaust is the beginning and ending of any intelligent thinking about Israel. But it's not. One can agree with the need for Israel to exist - and that the Holocaust shows us the value of it - without thinking that everything Israel does is justified and is not to be criticized because of it.

It is true that some Europeans (and others) think of Israel as having "gone over to the side of Auschwitz". But it has nothing to do with a belief in the dissolution of the nation-state. Surely, that's ridiculous. And I think most people who think such a thing would find it absurd. Not everyone who wanted to stop Germany also wanted to end the existence of the nation-state. Indeed, hardly any of them thought this way. They were protecting nations. When people see Israel as an oppressor, it is this same instinct asserting itself – whether they are right or not about it.

Let's consider another quote:

It is driven by the rapid advance of a new paradigm that understands Israel, and especially the independent Israeli use of force to defend itself, as illegitimate down to its foundations.

You are talking about the vilification of Israel which is going on in certain circles. Note how you say that these people see Israel's attempt to defend itself as illegitimate. But there is no reason to think that anyone thinks that. What is usually said in such circumstances is that Israel is not doing defensive actions but offensive ones. I've also seen in such places a tendency to poo-poo the idea that Israel has to worry about being destroyed by Arab or Palestinian forces. The ability of Israel to defend itself in the past has led people to take for granted that it can continue to do so, not to question its right to do so. Questioning its right to do so has happened as well - but only by those that have begun to think that Jews illegitimately stole Palestinian land by creating Israel. But that, again, has nothing to do with ideas about the dangers of the existence of nation-states.

So, to summarize:

(1) There has been a tendency by some, esp. in Europe, to hope for a future in which nation-states don't exist anymore.
(2) This tendency is mainly restricted to a few intellectuals and bureaucrats.
(3) Even the tendency to integrate nation-states more closely, as in the European Union, is on the wane. And that is still very far from the dissolution of the nation-state.
(4) And all of this has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It doesn't even have anything to do with truculent denunciations of Israel.
(5) So there is no reason to think that defending the existence of nation-states and their right to self-determination will help Israel in any way.

Finally, let me say that you have created a story, a paradigm, if you will, to try and explain why vilification of Israel in various places, esp. in Europe, is happening and doesn't seem to lessen, regardless of what Israel does. This paradigm is a distorted view of the situation and prevents you from seeing what is really happening.

I'd like to suggest a new view. In the first few decades of Israel's existence, it was being attacked by Arabs as having no right to exist, as an example of European imperialism. Hezbollah and Hamas are, to my mind, remnants of that paradigm. Arafat started to move away from that paradigm - though it is not clear if he was really sincere about it. Nevertheless, it started the Palestinians on the path of a new paradigm - that of a right of their people to self-determination. A large number of the Palestinian people have come to think that living in peace with Israel might be acceptable. This is the new paradigm. It has come to the point where we now have a leader among the Palestinians, Abbas, who sincerely wants to make peace with Israel. It is this new paradigm that Israel must embrace. To not trust it means to continue living in the old paradigm where Israel can only survive by fighting its neighbors and not trust them at all. Israel now has a potential partner in peace. It must decide which of these paradigms it is to follow.

Michael Rosenberg

July 29, 2010

N/A

I understand what you write about the paradigm shift, but am confused about what new or different political prescriptions would then necessarily ensue from such a shift.

Jewish national self-determination as manifested by a Jewish state is bad, therefore, conjoint Jewish/Palestinian self-determination manifested by a united state or Palestinian self-determination manifested by a single state, is good?

How would those who have undergone this shift solve the competing prerequisites for each of these groups. Or, is their answer simply one state for two peoples is a tad better than two states for two peoples?

Also, it would seem logical that the shift would require the Europeans to proclaim a pox on both houses; both groups want the same thing.

If it is the shift which accounts for the delegitimization of Israel isn't it hypocritical to delegitimize the national aspirations of only one group?

To me your paradigm shift theory leaks a little too much water.

However, come to think of it, I believe there is a paradigm shift occuring, but one different than you described.

To fully understand the shift I perceive one would do better to consult with Bat Ye'or on the weltanshauung of Eurabia.

I would respectfully submit that when one combines traditional leftist anti-semitism, traditional European anti-semitism, traditional Muslim anti-semitism, and adds a dash of Arab oil and money, the result is a world view in which Israel was born in sin, lives in sin, and can never do right.

Adina Kutnicki

July 28, 2010

N/A

Having been surrounded most of my life by the uber liberal left of the upper east and west sides of NYC-until my aliyah in 2008-I am very familiar with the chattering classes and their contempt for Jewish nationalism. While their Jewish counterparts are more circumspect about their disdain for the 'Zionist project', suffice it to say that they are mainly in sync with their like minded peers.
Your incisive essay on European paradigm shifts regarding nation states, and most especially how it relates to Israel, answers alot of what heretofore seemed inexplicable.The very fact that facts matter not a whit when discussing Israel is self evident.
It is also the case that most people equate the reborn nation of Israel with the unbearable horrors and stain of the Holocaust.While this is certainly true, even more persuasive an argument is deconstructing the myth that Israel is an upstart nation, hastily built upon the ashes of the Holocaust. In its place should be an in depth scholarly discussion, via irrefutable historical sources, that Israel is not a new nation, rather the continuation of Jewish history, the very place where its people dwelled longer than any other people in recorded history.
Again, while facts are blithely thrown into the trashcan of history, it is nevertheless imperative to keep hammering the above fact home.
Further, a new paradigm must demonstrate that the culmination of the Holocaust would most likely have occurred regardless of Nazism, (erroneously blamed on Germany's nation state status) for Jews have been expelled, persecuted and otherwise murdered for as long as history has been recorded.Therfore, what other people are more in need of their own home-a sanctuary of sorts-than the Jewish people?
Moreover, while the EU is busy dismantling its nation states-and in a similarly tragic fashion the US and others are heading in the same trajectory-where is the discussion about the Islamic nation states? Instead of dismantling, they are engaged in a world wide killing frenzy-to merge their imperialist designs under a Caliphate-of which will emerge the polar opposite of a 'non aggressive' world order.
In other words, while the Euros (and others) seek a delusionary prescription to a world on the brink, they are leaving intact the one grouping which will implode their fantasy.
Perhaps an in depth discussion of the above is a good construct for a decidely more realistic and valid paradigm shift.

Pedro Jose Izquierdo

July 27, 2010

None

I have just had the chance to read this excellent essay. I have many many questions and objections and comments about it, but I don't have much time to write them all out. I will only try to point out to you a few. Please keep in mind that I fully accept any criticism of my views (especially my characterization of the Jewish –or this author's– position). If there are some strong passages in what follows, they are not meant to offend.

First. I think that much of what can be said about the vilification of Israel, which occurs quite apart from the facts, can also be said of the present political correctness behind the vilification of the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church (even more so of Opus Dei, of which many people who don't hesitate to consider "evil" or at least "suspicious", know literally nothing). I don't know if you see this as clearly as I do (just as I certainly did not see it in the case of Israel as clearly as this article explains it). The sexual abuse scandal, horrendous and sickening as it is, is an excellent example of how the actual facts of the cases, the facts about how they were handled, the facts about how many of these cases actually took place, the facts about what the actual laws of the Church on the subject are, and the facts about what Pope Benedict has done, were completely irrelevant to the discussion, or used and interpreted in such a way that they only fed the anti-Catholic frenzy. Similar things happen in more general trends, for example the discussion about the ordination of women, the Church's stance on contraception or homosexual marriage, etc. In general, the reality is that most people who criticize Catholic doctrines or dogmas rarely give themselves the time to even understand what they are attacking. A few weeks ago, a professor of the University of Illinois was fired for "hate speech" when he taught his students of "Introduction to Catholicism" that the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law. That is to say, a professor whose job it was to explain the tenets of a faith was fired for doing precisely that. Would this have happened if he would have been a Muslim teaching the same thing about his own religion, which holds similar views of homosexual acts? Being here in the United States, I have seen that there is very little that I can actually say or show about what the Catholic Church actually believes, does, says or promotes, to change people's vehemently negative views of it. Most will also suggest that we should "change our stance" –the more liberals–, while others –the conservatives– say we also need "better PR".

Second. I don't fully agree with the author's thesis that it is the rise of the "globalist" paradigm that has made Israel subject to vilification, at least in terms of individual people. I daresay there are many perfectly patriotic Britons or Americans who nonetheless despise the Israeli government's actions, just as many despised the actions of Bush's government in Iraq, or any other country performing what they see as abusive. I would think that much of this comes more from a sentimentalist portrayal of the Palestinian cause, than from a more overarching philosophical presupposition about the political soundness of nation-states. Additionally, it seems to me that much of the reaction against Israel comes from what many people see as its "arrogance" in international affairs. Many see that the Israelis justify their few rather blatant violations of international law (and all their other actions) through a line of argument that is considered preposterous, or at least, exaggerated, overly self-serving and self-victimizng: they see Israel defending its actions by claiming, on the one hand, that it was created to defend the Jews from an impending, imminent, and barely controllable historical tendency toward the destruction of their race, and on the other, that voicing a contrary opinion to the actions of the Israeli government is equivalent to an attack on the philosophical and historical underpinnings of its "legitimacy", and therefore, in some way, an espousal of an anti-Semitic desire to destroy all Jews, or allow them to be destroyed by that irresistible historical tendency. This is not to deny that many other countries have violated international law many many times. Rather, I think that seeing Israel and its attitude in this way leads many to portray the actions and words of its government (and its defenders) as an arrogant and exceptionalist (and even somewhat hysterical) defense of their violations of international law and other actions. To put it more clearly, people are bothered by the assumption that criticizing Israel "must" mean that one is anti-Semitic. They are bothered by what they see as a defense of Israel that portrays it as untouchable.

Third. The problem with the paradigm argument about Israel and Auschwitz is that, from what I could gather, it sees everything from the particularist worldview Judaism seems to propose. The problem and the conflict between Jews and the rest of Western culture about Israel is, I think, better understood if one sees it from this point of view. In other words, the author of the essay thinks that "Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz" because he thinks that the entire problem of Auschwitz is (mainly) about the Jews. For a European, Auschwitz is about the systematic destruction of people based on an arbitrary characterization (similar to the enslavement of black people based on the arbitrary factor that they happen to have a darker skin color). For the Jew, it seems, the problem of Auschwitz is less the mechanized and diabolical killing of a group of people, than the mechanized and diabolical killing of Jews. If the Nazis had killed six million Chinese, the argument, it seems, would be different from the Jew's point of view, but not from the European's. Now, you may reply that this kind of argumentation is fallacious, because the fact is that six million Jews, not Chinese, perished in the concentration camps. It is not a coincidence that it was precisely the Jews that were targeted, and this manifests a tendency toward anti-Semitism in history that must be acknowledged, understood, and checked. By saying this, the author seems to be characterizing Nazism and its concentration camps as primarily an attack on Jews. The European says: "it is less important who was killed, than why, how, and for what purpose". It would be exactly the same if six million Chinese had been singled out for the death camps. If one choses to think that it is of paramount importance that Jews were targeted, and that this follows from a big historical trend, then it seems that it is justifiable for Israel to take measures that defend it from this trend which other nations don't have to face. If one takes the European view, the problem is more in the kind of society that would allow itself to murder anyone in such a way, and the solution is not to give the targets weapons, but to find out what went wrong in the country that performed such evil acts. If for the European Auschwitz signifies mass killing and the depth of human brutality, then any other country that attempts to do the same thing the Germans were doing –purify their land and hold it only for their nation– is on the road to a similar scheme of thought. This doesn't mean it will end up with concentration camps, but it does mean that it has missed the point of Auschwitz.

This is why the attempt to retrieve the paradigm seems to be doomed to failure (that is, as long as it's based on this characterization of history). As outlined here, the nation-state-paradigm justification of Israel as "the opposite of Auschwitz" only works for Israel, because for this author, Auschwitz was primarily about the Jews. The meaning of Auschwitz is restricted to its impact on the history of anti-Semitism, not –for example– on its impact on the history of the German people or its meaning. This last thesis I find especially striking and strange: it seems that Auschwitz, to the author, has little to say about the German people, their thought, history, character, and politics (and by extension, about European civilization), compared to what it has to say about the history, development, and manifestations of anti-Semitism in the world.

Because the author sees everything (including the rise of Israel and its instantiation of the "nation-state" paradigm) in terms of their specific effect on Jews, the paradigm he defends or wants to retrieve would only work for Israel (what other country can be "the opposite of Auschwitz" if the whole meaning of Auschwitz is not so much what was done there, but to whom?). That is to say, the paradigm he is defending is not the nation-state (which can apply to many other peoples), but the "opposite of Auschwitz" (which, it seems, contains the right of the Jewish people to fight back). This is why this paradigm is rejected by everyone else. What other country can claim that it is defending itself from a second Auschwitz? Using this justification for their acts makes Israel's political and national experience incommunicable to other countries, and adds a pinch of untouchability to what they do, which is exactly contrary to most modern international relations theory. If Israel wants to be an equal member of the family of nations, it must first relinquish this claim. Otherwise, it will be singling itself out deliberately for a paradigm clash.

The author wants to defend a paradigm that can only apply to Israel, while at the same time stating that the whole problem stems from a conflict of paradigms. He diagnoses the problem brilliantly, but falls into the same hole he wants to evade.

I agree with you that the problem is in a clash of paradigms, but this clash is between the Israeli paradigm and all others, it seems.

David Corwin

July 27, 2010

N/A

Thank you very much for your letter. I'm very aware of the common disagreement between left and right about how Israel can improve its image in the world, and I think you've made a very interesting addition to this debate.

I do, however, disagree very much with your analysis. In Part III, you discuss the two different paradigms, one which advocates more strongly for the nation-state, and one which argues for dismantling of the nation-state in favor of global (or at least pan-European) unity. One sees Nazi Germany as an example of European unity, the other, as an example of nationalism gone awry. However, even though you divide into two patterns of governance, one which emphasizes national individualism and is supported by Paradigm A, and one which emphasizes inter-national unity and is supported by Paradigm B, I believe there are three. You seem to define the latter pattern (which we might label "universalism") as one where everyone is controlled by the same government, whereas national self-determination involves smaller, individual governments; hence Nazi Germany is an example of universalism, for Nazism sought for one government to control all of Europe. Similarly, the European Union is an example of "universalism," for it attempts to place more affairs under the control of an international body. But there is a big distinction between these kinds of "universalism." In one case, the EU, multiple nations are joining together, with a view that each one will have some sovereignty. In the German example, the idea was not simply that Europe would be unified, but that Europe would be unified under Germany. That is, Germany would rule over others, and German interests would be put well before others' interests. We have three situations, all of which are very different:

a) Different nations live together in peace and pursue their own national interests
b) One nation pursues its own national interest to the point where it impedes upon other nations' sovereignty, such as invading them, stealing from them, or, most important, ruling over them, in one universal state, but one in which that nation dominates the others
c) A multilateral universal state, or at least institution (potentially over a large section of land and peoples previously divided into distinct nations)

I think Nazi Germany satisfies b) and not c), while the EU satisfies c). The reason that b) is in some way like a) is because Germany was in fact acting in a way that satisfied its own national interest (it can be beneficial for a nation, albeit wrong, to rule over others without consent), and this is what leads proponents of Paradigm B to oppose nationalism. The problem is that Germany was satisfying its own interests in such a way that usurped the rights of other nations to national-self determination, so Nazism is still an example of b), not a). It goes back to the idea of consent of the governed that we must give up some of our freedom in order to protect our freedom. In a sense, the European Union could even be seen as an upholder of national self-determination; it just may have to restrict that freedom in order to preserve it.

This is very relevant for Israel, because the mainstream European and American movement which makes up this delegitimization sees Israel as illegitimate not because it satisfies a), but because they believe it satisfies b), the reason for this being its control of the West Bank. I've been around leftists for much of my life, many of them far enough to the left that they might be considered part of this "delegitimization of Israel," and many of them are very happy with those in Israel who support the concept of a state which identifies as Jewish but are against the occupation. They support a), but not b). This can also be seen from the fact that much pro-Palestinian activism is driven by the notion of Palestinian national self-determination. Their issue with Israeli self-determination is only to the extent that they believe it blocks Palestinian self-determination. Yes, there are those, especially in the Muslim world, who believe only in the destruction of Israel or any kind of Jewish state anywhere between the Mediterranean and the Jordan; but the overwhelming view among campus groups and the kinds of European groups we're discussing is anti-occupation (see, for example, bigcampaign.org, which, as these groups go, is quite anti-Israel). Maybe you disagree with the right to Palestinian national self-determination, maybe these groups have quite a bias in favor of the Palestinians against Israel, but they certainly do not oppose the concept of national self-determination.

I think it's important to remember what the issue we're tackling is. And this issue is that Israel is being singled out above other nations, not that anti-nationalist ideology is sweeping the entire world. It reminds me of a part of a response I recently received from the World Socialist Movement in response to a question I had about one of their articles regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
"The point here is that, as socialists, we are opposed to nationalism of every description - Jewish/Israeli, Russian, America, British, Chinese, Serbian, etc., etc. - no matter what justification is given for it, since all it does is to create quite artificial divisions among people from differnt parts of the globe, all of whom in fact have the same fundamental interest.

This means - and you may well already know this - that we don't share the unique, almost pathological, antipathy that the left (many of whom call themselves 'socialists') harbours for Israel, seemingly over and above all other states and all other nationalisms. This antipathy derives largely from Israel's identification with the US, which the left - as some kind of throwback from its support for the Russian Revolution and the post second world war 'anti-communist' crusade by the US - continues to see as somehow different from, and more unacceptable than, the economic and political manoeuverings of other large powers such as Russia and China."

That is, the anti-nationalist movement is very distinct from the worldwide anti-Israel movement.

It's also interesting to note that José Maria Aznar, founder of the Friends of Israel Initiative, made a strong push for Spain to become part of the European Union while he was Prime Minister.

Michael Miller

July 27, 2010

None

I want to begin by thanking you for your excellent analysis of the post-nationalist paradigm (and, while I'm at it, for your outstanding book The Jewish State). The presentation and explanation of the shift are exceptionally clear, probably better than even its adherents have offered, and help in understanding the outrageous, inciteful, offensive, but, from their ideological perspective, perfectly logical conclusions. Does this viewpoint represent the paradigm shift you claim? I think it should be more accurately described as a branch of a larger paradigm shift. While it may be enjoying some popularity among sophisticates in Europe, its foundation in reality is more than a little shaky, and most importantly, it stems from the still dominant socialist movements.

The EU does signify a surrender, in some measure, of national sovereignty. It is still too early to say whether it can hold up, but even if it does manage to resolve its serious intra-national contradictions, it is still faced with Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, not to mention the US, none of which nations appear to be much affected by any post-nationalism, despite periodic lip-service to the "world community." Under these circumstances, one might predict the imminent demise of such post-national fantasies. The conclusions reached regarding Germany's historical development is, exactly as you put it, preposterous. Facts can't be avoided permanently and all evidence tells us German Nazism was, far from typical, an aberration. And we have a long history pre-EU with many nation-states resolving differences without war.

Secondly, the EU along with the US and other nations have been devoting substantial resources to the stabilization of weak states and the establishment of even weaker states, i.e., "nation-building." With one exception, which you state clearly in your introductory remarks: As regards Israel, and only Israel, destabilization and disestablishment is the objective. So the Europeans appear to be quite enthusiastic about Palestinian nationalism; it's progressive, while Israeli nationalism is reactionary and obsolete. This, in the end, is not addressed by this post-nationalist hypothesis.

I believe the real paradigm shift took place within the larger context of collectivist/individualist philosophies, and more specifically, within the context of socialism/capitalism, and then most particularly in the context of the supposed struggle against imperialism on behalf of the "third world" with its multifarious national liberation movements. The inexorable and relentless momentum towards delegitimizing Israel began when the Arab states and the Soviet Union formed an alliance against the US. From that moment, typically associated with the '67 war, virtually the entire left --the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals, the new left, the peace movement and over time many American liberals-- abandoned Israel, branding it forever as on the wrong side of history. These movements represented and still represent the large majority of the politically active in Europe. The identification of Israel as imperialist-colonialist aggressor was even then, prior even to the post-Zionist ideas in Israel much less any sign of post-nationalism in Europe, sufficient to begin introducing the Nazi label. The oppressor-oppressed paradigm is impervious to rational analysis: the existence of suicide bombers shows not the depravity of the perpetrator but how extreme the oppression must be.

Internationally this involved a rather gigantic and conspicuous U-Turn. This began with Arafat's appearance at the UN, in military garb --note the conspicuous absence of any protest by the so-called peace movement. This was followed by the inability of the security council to decide whether to condemn the the hijackers of the airplane or condemn Israel for violating Uganda's sovereignty in the rescue at Entebbe, the Sovereign at the time being the much feted and honored "leader of African socialism" Idi Amin, soon to be exposed as one of the worst leaders anywhere at any time. Finally, not long after, there was the resolution on Zionism. That decade of the 70s, which included the Munich attack, seemed dark indeed; now it appears these were merely the omens of worse times to come.

These post-national ideas, I believe, are a relatively insignificant part of the latest rationalizations and pretexts in the old battle against imperialism. The left, frustrated with an uncooperative, even hostile, proletariat, embraced the developing nations to defeat the capitalist system. Shorn of their earlier pretensions of "scientific socialism" the movement has more recently reduced its paradigm to haves and have-nots. This makes everything plain and simple. No, more than simple, simplistic. In fact, more than simplistic, one could say it's simpletonian, that is, virtually without intellectual content, let alone merit. And they are not particularly interested in struggles between the have-nots and other have-nots nor in struggles involving the have-nots and the have-nothings, for example, in the Sudan or the Congo, or in urban centers in the world. The rich white world has wealth and power; the poor non-white world has not. Israel is easily identified with the former; in fact Israel stands out as the most easily identifiable among all the struggles and wars deserving of attention.

The old and new left, the "progressives" continue to see the empire of US capital as the greatest obstacle to their utopian vision of world harmony, peace, justice --in a word world government-- and as the greatest despoiler and corrupter of society, the entire species, and the planet. A step towards their goal begins with any perceived defeat of the US. Their main enemy coincides with that of the Islamic jihadists, and also appeals opportunistically to many nations who bargain the chip in their relations with the US. And where is the US weakest? Israel. This Great/Little Satan paradigm is sufficient in itself to explain the incessant vilification of Israel. By comparison, even ancient and enduring anti-semitic prejudice is a negligible factor. Reason and facts are irrelevant. It is seriously and vehemently argued that Israel is not a democracy, and, at the same time, that Israel should recognize and negotiate with Hamas because it was democratically elected.

The left, however, has not been able to hold its unity, and this is where the European post-nationalist paradigm has a serious and pernicious influence. Seeing the Muslims in Europe as todays Jews, Europeans are reticent to the point of timidity in confronting Islamic culture, or even challenging radical Islam, since that would entail asserting one's own national culture as superior or superceding the culture of the immigrant. While many on the European left see the danger in jihad and sharia they still retain a greater fear of the nationalism of the right. And right-wing nationalism is what they perceive in the Israeli state. And what better theory to expiate the Euro-guilt over the Holocaust? Look! The Jews have become Nazis!

Socialist ideology had its greatest influence and enjoyed its biggest wave in the 1920s-30s. Allying itself with the national movements against US imperialism, it had another moment in the sun in 60s-70s. Now allying itself with radical Islam it hopes to ride another wave, but it is entirely deluded, as were the Iranian communists and socialists who helped drive the Shah from power and thought the Islamic revolution would lead to a socialist revolution. We may yet see other waves, revivals in various forms of socialism, but faith in the rationally planned society has been fatally weakened while the understanding of the principles of capitalist economics are becoming more and more widespread. Despite their dedication, activism and vociferousness --and consequent influence disproportionate to their numbers-- the real paradigm shift is just the opposite of what they expected. But that's another topic.

I look forward to your coming Letters from Jerusalem.

Bernard Baars

July 27, 2010

N/A

Dear friends,

I'm a scientist, an amateur historian of science, and intimately familiar with the Thomas Kuhn book, which puts me under the triple disadvantage of actually knowing what I'm talking about.

What is more serious, Hazoni's Kuhn analogy is actively pernicious, because it confuses an ideological agitprop campaign from the European Left in active collusion with Hamas (and such) with a SCIENTIFIC theoretical paradigm. The two are totally different.

Scientific paradigs are rigorously defined by facts and logic. Political ideologies are loosely coupled by free associations, analogies, puns, scapegoating, deliberate falsehoods, and mob psychology. That is not how healthy science works.

Scientific paradigms are robust because they are deeply anchored in facts and logic. Ideologies break down much more quickly than scientific paradigms ever do, because they are loosey-goosey flufferies that come and go.

It follows that the Left-Islamist campaign against Israel today is much more fluffy and fragile than any real scientific effort. It's a Hollywood movie set. If you nudge it, it falls over.

The Kuhn analogy is therefore hugely overstated. It makes it seem that Israel's enemies are somehow anchored in evidence the way scientific theories are. It makes it seem that they are logically coherent, when in fact the Left and the Islamic fascists disagree with each other on every single point of doctrine.

And finally, the 'paradigm' analogy gives a false air of inevitably and irreversibility to the anti-Israel campaign.

But it is neither inevitable nor irreversible. It's just a political campaign, no more. Indeed, militarily Israel is the best-defended country in the world. It also carries the biggest retaliatory punch. The Arabs fear Israel, which is rational. The madcap Twelver Cult in Tehran should fear Israel, as generals in the Iranian Army do. But they say they don't, and we have to take them at their word. But as we know, the cities of Iran hate the Dictators (their word) much more than they hate Israel or America. On YouTube you can see the Green Movement counter-chant to the old BS of "Death to Israel! Death to America!" The Greenies chant in response, "Death to China! Death to Russia!" to ridicule the regime. Nobody believe these evil bastards any more. It's a giant front, ready to crumble like the Soviet Union crumbled.

This international anti-Israel campaign is all smoke and mirrors. It's designed to demoralize you. If you allow yourselves to be demoralized you are going along with them. Morale and courage are just as important as weapons systems. Never, never forget that.

That's the Alinsky method: You make it appear that you are much scarier and more powerful than you really are. It's a poker bluff. Even the Muslim radicals are bluffers, as Israel of all countries should realize. Lying and bluffing are an integral part of their imperialistic strategy, and have been since Mohammed. Don't forget he was a camel trader. Bluff was part of his standard toolkit. Same with the bazaar merchants in Tehran. Bluff, cheat, deceive, and win.

Or as Maimonides said, "Mohammed is a meshuganneh." By the time of Maimonides the Muslims had been around for five centuries. Everybody understood them.

Give you some examples of the difference between political ideologies and Kuhnian paradigms.

1. Nazi "philosophy" was a racist ideology. BUT Einsteinian Relativity was a scientific paradigm. Einstein is still a scientific paradigm founder. Hitler is just dead.

2. Stalinist "philosophy" was a socialist paradigm. BUT Newtonian physics was a scientific paradigm. Newton's paradigm is still used in engineering and physical mechanics, because it's still the best theory for relatively slow speeds and relatively small masses --- like planets and rockets. After four centuries Newton is still valid in most aspects of the physical world. Stalin's empire crumbled of its own inner contradictions around 1991.

This is NOT the same, folks. Don't fall for a totally false analogy. Kuhn himself protested the constant and blatant abuse of his ideas, and regretted that he ever published them. They are seductive, but they just don't apply to mere belief systems. Everybody has a belief system. You need to work and think hard, and be very lucky, to understand a scientific paradigm.

Kuhn's own training was in physics. So he was very much thinking about physics, NOT ideology, and certainly NOT the loosey-goosey Left-fascist axis we see today.

We should never underestimate a serious enemy.

By the same token, we should never OVER-estimate an enemy, because if we do, we defeat ourselves.

That's the whole purpose of this display of front groups and fake suicide assaults by the Turkish Hamasnoids. Look, if they really were confident in their power they would not settle for agitprop demonstrations off the coast of Gaza. They would attack. The reality is that they fear Israel, for very good and realistic reasons.

What the pro-Israel forces have failed to do is engage in the same propaganda campaigns that Obama and Jodie Evans specialize in. (Remember that Code Pink was a major organizer of the Mavi Marmara fiasco!!! This was a setup, this was political theater, and the Turks provided the suiciders to make it look real). I have a very Leftist friend, and he told me a week ago, OF COURSE it was an agitprop operation! He just saw it instantly.

Never lose sight of the fact that Obama is an Alinsky organizer. Read Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and you'll see how malevolent this bunch really is, and how anti-Western, anti-middle class, anti-freedom, and anti-sovereignty. This is a madcap ideology, with clowns and fools staffing the ranks.

They give the false appearance of power --- and until Obama gets defeated in the election of 2012 they will have some real power. But under very tight constraints. Even the Democrats in Congress just hugely supported Israel in a recent vote. When the Republicans take over the House in 2010 they will have the power of the purse, so they can control things by controlling the money. Obama is scaring the daylights out of average Americans, and he is in huge political trouble. But he keeps putting up a big front, because that's the Alinsky way. The false front is their biggest intimidation tactic.

Obama's good friend Jodie Evans organized the Gaza agitprop stunt with the active connivance of Hamas and the Turkish Islamist government, which is hated by large segments of Turkish society. Just as Hamas is hated by Egyptians, Lebanese, and Pals.

The proper counter-strategy is to sow confusion, fear, and splits in the ranks of the self-designated enemy.

Remember that they include the European Left in collusion with the Islamofascist radicals --- who are trying to overthrow Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the non-radicals in Lebanon and Iraq. These are natural enemies who hate each other, but who are in a temporary alliance of convenience.

He said this in the presence of the genocidal "president" of the Sudan. You know what he really meant, because the Turkish suidicers chanted "Khaibar! Khaibar!" as they ambushed the IDF soldiers who were running into their trap.

Large parts of the Left are in total disagreement with radical Islam. The Left goes back to Karl Marx in 1848. Radical Islam goes back to the 7th century in the deserts of Arabia. There is a difference.

So this is merely an alliance of convenience. It can disappear overnight, just like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact did when Nazi tanks invaded Poland and Russia.

The Sunnis hate and fear the Shiites, particularly with Iran's militance and aggressive technologies. The Left is always fragmented and screaming at each other. The Islamists are always fragmented. They have a thousands cracks in their front, and Israel, and pro-Israel people must exploit those divisions, and agitate in public against this disgraceful axis between atheists and fundamentalists, homosexuals and homophobes, feminists and woman-haters, modernists and people who desperately want to destroy modernity in all its aspects. These are not natural allies, they are natural enemies. We must drive a thousand wedges into their ranks.

What Israel must do is conduct an ideological campaign that is as effective and intelligent as Israel's military campaigns. If the Israeli government will not do it, it may take a network of neo-Zionists to do it. It's been done before. Read your history.

When Britain was being attacked by Hitler, it lost a lot of battles. But Churchill conducted a brilliant propaganda campaign in America. Once America entered the war on the side of Britain it was all over for the Nazis and the Japanese fascists.

I don't understand why Israelis feel pessimistic. Yes, of course there is war fatigue. But objectively the facts favor Israel --- IF Israelis and their hundreds of millions of friends in America, Europe, Australia and Asia just do the right thing. Israel is extremely popular in America. It's only the radical Left, including Jews like Chomsky, who are Israel's enemies.

There is no Kuhnian paradigm shift. That is pure Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Total, bizarre nonsense. And pernicious, because it discourages Israelis and their passionate allies around the world, who should maintain their morale and courage and sense of faith and hope.

There is plenty of reason for hope. You're allowing yourself to get suckered if you don't see that. Don't be a a sucker.

There is only an ideological campaign, very professional, very standard agitprop, with big headlines but no substance. If you look at the polls in Europe recently, ordinary Europeans realize what a pain in the butt the Iranians are. But we --- meaning civilized countries like Israel and America --- have vastly overwhelming military power. Iran's nuclear industry could be flattened inside a week. Any Iranian missiles and planes could be knocked down during the launch phase, when they are slow and extremely vulnerable. Between Israel and Iran there are huge numbers of defensive systems --- in all of Iran's neighbors, including Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, the other Gulf States, with US Aegis cruisers in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, in Israel proper, and in the Mediterranean (where Aegis anti-missile batteries cover Israel soil as well). Four US submarines have now been converted to carry 150 cruise missiles each.

Israel itself has the greatest concentration of anti-missile capabilities anywhere in the world, including the Arrow systems, Iron Dome, and jet-carried anti-missile missiles. You can fire an air-to-air missile from a jet, either at another jet, or at a missile. Israel has huge anti-missile capacities just in the IAF alone.

The Arab regimes fear Iran more than Israel does. They want Israel and the US to attack Iran. It is the logical thing to do. Obama may be delaying an attack on Iran in order to pressure Netanyahu to give up more land.

What we are seeing is a campaign of psychological intimidation.

Don't be psyched out! This is pure show. If it wasn't, they would not limit it to agitprop and big headlines. But they do, because they are weak and scared, and they all know it.

Jonathan Rynhold

July 26, 2010

Bar-Ilan University

I read your Jerusalem letter on deligitimization and paradigm shift with interest.

As a veteran of dealing with deligitimization, esp. in the UK viz the academic boycott I have some comments to make that you might find valuable.

1. In my opinion, you are correct to frame things in terms of paradigms, but your model is a) too simple and b) missing the major paradigm behind delegitimization.

2. There are 3 major paradigms, conservative, lberal and leftist. Conservatives are often pro-Israel or neutral, Leftists are anti-Israel. The Liberal playing field is the key one. Paradigms are not wholly discreet and separate, rather they intersect, like a Venn diagram. The name of the game is looking for the parts of each paradigms that intersect on Israel. The battle between pro-Israelism and the anti-Israel Left is at the intesection of liberalism; which intersects both with Leftism and apects associated with a pro-Israel position.

3. The major paradigm behind deligimtization comes from far-Left anti-Zionism and well orgainized small groups of activists who infiltrate and get hold of large orgnaizations like trade unions, who have many members but very few active members allowing radicals to gain power. Such people, or people who used to be associated with such radicalism, write the main delgit stuff in papers like The Guardian etc.

4. Although support for this group's idoelogy is small they gain support by blurring the distinction with the liberal paradigm; by speaking about occupation, human rights etc. But there are many apects of the liberal paradigm that can lead to support for Israel, even if national self-determination is not a big deal for certain liberals - Israeli democracy vs Hamas ideology etc. Also, as you are aware, Amnon Rubinstein and co have made a very good case for Israel's national legtimacy in liberal terms - the argument against singling out Israel has proved to be pretty effective in this nd other contexts.

5. You are certainly right that the decline in support for nationalism among liberals, makes it harder to make the Zionist case - but it should be possible to distigush between debate about Israeli policies and its right to exist, while poinitng out the nature of the other side. Europe will not become America, and of course the closer a liberal is to a more Leftist position which sees Arab amd Muslim terrorism and radicalism as a function of things done to them by the West/Israel, the harder that case is going to be to make. But exposing the darker anti-democratic side of the core of the boycott movement and the organizations they support can certainly help; as can the singling out/double standards stuff.

David Hornik

July 25, 2010

N/A

I've long been skeptical about claims that better Israeli hasbara could make such a difference. This profound discussion illuminates for me some of the basis for my skepticism.

Anubhav Singh

July 23, 2010

N/A

In a crude sense pan-islamism is a similar structure. Are we saying that this could be the underlying reasons for EU turning islamic? That this will happen, I am 100% sure, not sure how and why it will happen.

Avraham Keslinger

July 23, 2010

Israel Center

Rav Kook says (Ain Ayah on Masechet Shabbat 2,6) that in every generation some foreign ideology becomes popular and draws to it weak Jews (whom he calls "necheshalim"). It is the job of Tora scholars to show them how this ideology is included in Tora so that they will not turn their backs on Judaism. After this ideology falls out of favor we need not deal with it any more. He then expresses a hope that one day we will come to a true Jewish ideology.
According to this, the proper course of action is to interpret the new paradigm in accordance with Jewish teachings. This has the advantage of not being a direct attack on our interlocutors' point of view (see for example Rav Kook's answer to Shlomo Zalman Shragai, then chairman of HaPoel HaMizrachi, on which economic system will be in force in the time of Mashiach (Otzarot HaRaya 1,133 and 2,367). Note the use of the term "true Socialism" - implying that what we call Socialism is not true Socialism but not directly attacking it. Note also the use of the term "mishtar shel rechush" which can be interpreted in different ways and the implication that there will be rich and poor but stressing the brotherhood between them.
There are ample precedents in Jewish teachings to support the paradigm which envisages a world ruled by international law. While there are different opinions on the subject, some rule that the obligation of the nations of the world to institute a system of law is for them to adopt Jewish civil law (see Rackover Shilton HaChok B'Yisrael Chapter 5). This would mean that civil law would be identical in all countries. Moreover, the halacha rules that the other nations may not wage wars of conquest (see Encyclopedia Talmudit 3,354) ,which would imply that there is a law which governs international relations. In addition, as is well known, Yehoshua did not killl the Givonim because it would have been seen as a violation of international law (Radak on Yehoshua 9,15 and Gittin 46a with Rashi).
Regarding the place of Israel in this paradigm, Rabam states (Laws of Kings 12,3-5) that we do not desire to rule over the other nations but to be free to learn Tora. The other nations will also desire knowledge of HashemTaken in the wide sense, this would imply a global economy with Israel being a state of think-tanks which would issue legal treatises as well as advisory opinions. This, of course, would require and independant State of Israel in the entire Land of Israel. This, of course, would fit in with the ideal of an independant judiciary and academic freedom which are cornerstones of democracy.
If we can show our interlocutors that what they want is, in fact, found in Jewish law we will not only strengthen general support for the State of Israel but strenghten support for the true Jewish character of the State.

Ian B. Lane

July 22, 2010

Leiden University

I am not prepared to offer any detailed commentary on your article at this point since I have just finished it and wish to digest its contents for a while, but I do want to say that in the many years (decades) that I have "obsessively" (in the words of many of my close friends) followed the whole situation in the Middle-East in regards to Israel as the Jewish homeland I have rarely come upon an article such as yours that puts the situation in such a remarkably new context that many years of particular thinking of the subject must be reevaluated.

It is my fervent hope that your article will reach the most wide audience possible, and be read by all persons serious about understanding the worlds attitude towards the worlds only Jewish State.

I thank you for your excellent contribution and look forward to following the impact that your article makes.

Nadine Carroll

July 22, 2010

Buchanan St Antiques

Thank you for this important essay. But revulsion against nationalism is only half the story, in my opinion: the other half is the profound myopia of multi-culturalism. The post-nationalist EU-niks do not despise nationalism for everybody; they have no argument with it outside of the West. It is for Europe, America and Israel alone that they proscribe nationalism as the road to Auschwitz; they will not judge the non-Westerner. So Israel gets the double whammy as not only as an atavistic nation-state but also as a colonizer of the noble (or at least, immune from judgment) Arabs of the East.

Ellen Smith

July 22, 2010

N/A

Because people have hated Jews in the New Testament (never mind that Jesus and the disciples were Jewish) Israel is "different" to the world. Jews are "different" and they always will be.

Thank G-d, Israel has many friends: The Israel Christian Zionist Center, headed by a Dutchman; Christians United for Israel; and many others. Those in the Bible Belt who do respect Israel are many, thank G-d. They know that Israel is a rational democracy and their opponents' leaders are savages.

One problem: Israel has no oil money. They are brilliant and people respect that, but the oil money is talking. Witness the mosque near Ground Zero that both Jews and many other faiths are against. Bloomberg says he can't stop it. I don't believe him.

The Jews will survive because G-d is watching over them. As I wrote today to Olympia, Washington's food coop, boycotting Israel is bringing hatred into your lives. (they voted to boycott -- I think a lot of Arabs live there-- political action)

Israel is loving, helping at the Tsunami and Haiti and operating for free on Arab children. That is love.

The leaders, like Hamas, are robbing their people of a good life and the blame must be put squarely on their shoulders.

When we don't have a Muslim president, maybe the new president will ask Hamas to actually help their people. But the problem is: They thrive on hate. They are the ones who may be saying Israel is like Auschwitz...but don't you believe it.

And let's not forget the tremendous courage of the people who hid their children while they died, who sent them on Kindertransport...what incredible courage, and blessings on those who helped. We will survive.

David Rose

July 21, 2010

N/A

My son, Damon Rose, of the Jewish Agency, emailed your article to me because as ex machal who recalls hearing Hitler's rantings on the BBC against 'De Englische Juden' , I am aware we Jews are once again being set up for a Holocaust.

You speak of paradigms. Hitler was no man of letters, a lazy student, Google search tells me, yet Hitler goosetepping onto the pages of history created the Auschwitz paradigm. This is what your article taught me today and it rings true. Call it an uneasy feeling in my gut but I believe a growing number of educated Jews are questioning whether Israel as a Jewish State should exist. I have met one, a totally reasonable person that I was ill-quipped to debate on his level as an academic.

Mr Hazony, I am a simple man, a drop-out.I learned as I went along, but paradigms-shmaradigms, 'quo vadis?Do I pack my bags, take the next flight out of Israel, waving so long it's been nice to know you, or do I stay and gobstop the world and create a new paradigm? Isn't that what Jews have been doing ever since Moses stepped out of the wilderness to confront Pharaoh?

Roger Wilkinson

July 21, 2010

N/A

I was directed to your article from Daniel Pipes website, and found it most interesting and helpful. I had previously thought that likening Israel to Nazism was merely another shocking example of intemperate violent provocative language....

One thing I think however which does not emerge from your analysis is that while the paradigm you are describing does seem to be increasingly prevalent, it is not the only one current in the western world - it seems to be common among 'intellectuals', to be specific left leaning intellectuals with their influence on the media, but it doesn't resonate with conservatives - public opinion in the US, I understand, is still strongly pro-Israel....and support within the EU for the EU and what it stands for is not nearly as strong as its proponents would like to think. Most English people, given the opportunity would express grave reservations to the point of outright rejection of the European ideal.

Practically speaking then, I think that you just need to keep banging the drum for Israel's right to sovereignty, your opposition to the utopian dream; and the biggest hindrance is not the faulty western paradigm, which will continue and indeed no doubt strengthen, but your not making a clear enough sound. Every step of compromise is read by Arab and leftist alike as a sign of weakness.

Sherman Frager

July 21, 2010

N/A

What about all the Arab nation states, especially Palestinian Gaza and West Bank? How come the EU isn't bent out of shape because of their "nationalism"? Doesn't Israel's Jewishness, i.e. anti-semitism have something to do with it? Or is it just because we should know better because of our own personal European 'experience'?

Richard A. Ross

July 21, 2010

Attorney

I just wanted to let you know that I found your article most thought-provoking (it was forwarded to me by a friend). While I have no doubt that it is definitely a component of the present attitude in Europe, I believe that it doesn't fully recognize the role of anti-Semitism. Also, it is impossible to ignore the Muslim political influence in the EU countries. Lastly, with the economic problems now confronting Europe (and the world), there appears to be a trend to return to nation-centric thinking.

Germain Lucas

July 21, 2010

N/A

First, I must make this precision: contrarily to most French Canadian (to my biggest regrets) I am strongly pro-Israeli (I much more prefer this expression than pro-Zionist). I see Israel as an ally (or another prey of the same predator) against the biggest threat to democracy and western civilization: Islamism imperialism. Second, for the same reason, I am definitely supportive of the war on terror and I might buy my first bottle of Champagne should a US or an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear installations succeed!
That said, your opinion explaining the European anti-Israeli sentiment in light of a wider anti-nationalism sentiment rang a bell to me as a French Canadian.
Because, here in North America, Anglo-Saxons (among them a lot of Jewish intellectuals) regularly couple French Canadian will to culturally survive in an Anglophone ocean with tribalism! And the will of a lot of French Canadian to create a French speaking state in North America (Quebec) to ethnic cleansing similar to Nazism!
At the same time Anglo-Saxons are the most complacent with Israel, a state created on ethnic basis!!! For Anglo-Saxons, Israel always has a blank check because it is the only democracy in the Middle-East however "ethnic" it is (and being so in a level Quebec will never be allowed).
I hope you Mr.Hazony and some Anglo-Saxon analysts begin to understand that there is a lot of double standard in the way Anglo-Saxon world talking.
As a pragmatic nationalist, I certainly prefer the "soft" Anglo-Saxon double standards to the bloody islamist imperialism, but I certainly do understand European nationalists to be deeply annoyed by Anglo-Saxon speeches saying that Europe must send more and more men to be killed fighting Taliban…while also criticizing European refusal to let the increasingly islamist Turkey enter the European union! I can say the same thing about the critics on veil ban in Europe (did Anglo-Saxon analysts have heard stories about Muslim AND non-Muslim girls coerced to wear the veil?).
It is for me obvious that if the Europeans wish to calm the Islamist crocodile by feeding it with Israel, on the other side the Anglo-Saxons wish to calm the Islamist crocodile by feeding it with Europe!
Also, you have certainly noticed that if Leftists, Liberals and other former friends of Jews in Europe are not their friends anymore, on the other side though, Nationalists did not become their friends. It is mostly primary anti-Semitism, I agree, but there is also a payback feeling behind it: after WWII, Jews were among the main builders of Political correctness…which now benefit so much the Islamists!!!
Finally, my point is that if both Anglo-Saxons and Jewish people (both in Israel and around the globe) want to win the war on terror, they'd better accept the fact that they better reconcile with Nationalists in the western world instead of hoping that the western world will resist Islamisation just to better embrace full and unlimited Anglicisation!

Gerald M. Rosmarin

July 21, 2010

N/A

I read your interesting essay and agree with a good part of it. What is not mentioned is the age old inbred antisemitism that trumps almost all else. Additionally, you never mention the new paradigm of the Islamization of Europe. If Israel is to develop a PR that works, it is to inculcate Europeans and Americans with what is slowly taking over the west, and leaving them with the thoughts that Israel maybe the last bastion of democratic freedom...

David Bensimon

July 21, 2010

ENS

I read with great interest your insightful paper. Living in Paris, I very much agree with your analysis. Indeed for most of Europe Intelligentsia nationalism is anathema and identified with "National socialism".
I was however disappointed by the lack of a solution to the problem that you so convincingly described: how does one reverse the current paradigm and give nationalism a new life?

In Europe two trends seem to suggest a solution:

1) The disappearance of the Nation-State has given rise to a disintegration of the Nation, rather than to the forging of a common identity. In France the Corsican, in Italy the Northern League, in Spain the Catalan and the Basque, in the UK the Scotts, etc. all call for their autonomy and independence from the centralising power of the old Nation-State.

2) The effects of globalization (delocalisation, loss of economic independence, the power of market forces and Big Business, etc.) are all seen as a consequence of the loss of the Nation-State. More and more people call for the State to protect them against the bureaucracy of Brussels that are seen to encourage the forces of Liberalism and the free market. You can see that in the response to the Greek crisis and in the very different attitudes to globalisation between the well developped welfare states of Western Europe and the Eastern States, that are incidently more nationalistic yet embrace more enthousiastically the opportunities of globalization.

I wonder what type of solution you would suggest......

Yonatan Horovitz

July 21, 2010

Midreshet HaRova

I found this piece fascinating. However, it left me very concerned as to how we will ever create the paradigm shift that you believe is necessary in order to change the view of Israel in Europe and the Western world.
I have one question, though. Much of the harsh rhetoric aimed at Israel goes hand in hand with the calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Surely, such a state would once again go against the multi-nation model that the modern democratic states seem to prefer. Based on your theory, one would expect to hear calls for a Middle-East alliance, similar perhaps to the European Union. Of course, we are all aware, that in the current political reality such an alliance is unthinkable, but would an international call for such a body not be the natural corollary to your theory.

Thank you once again for your "Letters".

Alon Ardenboim

July 20, 2010

Tel-Aviv University

My name is Alon and I'm an MSc student in the field of computer science in Tel Aviv University.I stumbled across your article when one of my friends posted a link to it on facebook (who would have thought that someone would be exposed to something intelligent through facebook).

It was refreshing to read some non-superficial analysis of the situation here, instead of the old "How can they not see the truth? They must be anti-semite!" opinion that we usually hear through the standard media channels. I think that your article made some very good points regarding the reason certain circles in Europe see us the way they do.

Regarding the national state paradigm we want to promote, I think that in order to promote such a paradigm we need to recognize the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and to drop the "dream" of a Greater Israel which is imperialistic by nature, and doesn't sit with the idea of a Jewish state for the purpose of self-defense (as we already dropped the idea of two banks of Jordan).

I know that first thing tomorrow I'm taking the Thomas Kuhn book from the university's library for a good read.

Thanks for the article, I enjoyed it very much.

David Schlussel

July 20, 2010

N/A

An interesting read with much to it but a great many facts seem to rest outside of your theory. Such as:

1. Why Israel of all the dozens of States formed in the 20th century, many of which are at war (low level or otherwise)?2. Why the inordinate focus on Israel as compared to other countries?3. Why the focus on Israel from 3rd world countries?4. The Nations of the E.U are not giving up their sovereignty so soon and independently decide when and where to field their troops.5. The super state structures seem to be getting weaker, not stronger. For example:a. The United Nations authority seems to mostly reside in meetings. The creation of States (like Israel) and military actions (like Korea) seem very remote.b. The Soviet Union dissolved into member states (yes, Russia is trying to reassert but not as a “union”).c. The Arab league is ineffective and no one thinks there will be a UAR again.

How do questions such as these fit within your paradigm?

Michael J. Broyde

July 19, 2010

Emory University School of Law

Thank you for sending the article "Israel Through European Eyes" of Dr Hazony to me. I read it closely, and in truth I think Yoram Hazony is wrong in this case. [I do not say that lightly, as Dr. Hazony is a careful thinker as a general matter, and is one who I have a healthy respect for as a writer, thinker and very smart man.] I think his basic mistake is that he misunderstands the intellectual and legal trends in Europe, as most Israelis do (and most American's do also) and this leads him to misunderstand the issue and thus not have a solution to the problem.

In my view, the central issue is not Israel at all, but the rise of international procedural law rules in European law, in which proper government is not measured by just results, but by compliance to rules of procedure which are the hallmark of modern international law. Israel has never been very good at obedience to these international law rules (its occupation of the West Bank being just one example where Israel has a hard time explaining what it is doing as a matter of international procedural law, with its limited categories and pigeon hole boxes which the West Bank does not fit into). As Europe has become more and more concerned with these procedural issues, Israel is more and more a target.

Let me give you a classical example that plays to our favor. Why is Iran a target of sanction over nuclear issues by Europe and Israel is not? Israel has (I assume) nuclear weapons and will use them first rather than be destroyed! The answer European's provide is very different than the answer American provide. European governments reply "Israel never signed the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so its nuclear weapons are not a violation of international law; Iran signed, so it must obey." America provides a different response: "Iran is bad and scary and Israel is not". One universe is concerned with substantive justice and one with procedural issues. In this case, it plays to Israel's favor, but generally, it does not.

Israel is continuously stunned that they get no credit in the European world stage for "being the good guys in a really bad place" -- America is so stunned also, frequently by the Europeans in this regard -- and President Bush certainly never understood the European mindset. But, the simple truth is that "substantive justice" -- being moral and right -- that is not the currency of the European realm now. The proper currency in Europe is procedural justice and not substantive justice. To give you another example. Israel was stunned at the bad feedback it got for the assassination in Dubai of Mabhouh by (putatively) Israeli agents using forged foreign passports. Israel more or less responds to the criticism by saying "but we were doing the right thing -- Mabhouh was a really bad man and deserved to be killed," to which the EU nations reply "Who cares! It is a violation of international law to forge passports." Both sides are telling a truth as they see it, but neither really understands the other.

I am not endorsing the trend in Europe as good -- but I see the trend very clearly and think it is the basic and most important explanation of what is happening to Israel.

I suspect that the situation is going to get much worse before it gets better as the very nature of Israeli culture really does not focus on procedure but substance. Understanding the current trend in Europe to handle it correctly is very important -- and I do not think that the otherwise downright brilliant Dr. Hazony has put his finger on this mark correctly yet. If Israel wants European blessing, the very structure of how Israeli decisions are made will have to change to reflect notions of procedural justice and not substantive Justice. By this measure, for example, the Dubai assassination was wrong and should not have been done.

Pesach Goodley

July 19, 2010

N/A

Lots to digest, and I can't follow the conclusion because the world is larger than an EU that is failing. Wherever the world wishes to examine, there are wars of potential extinction or at least conquest. Darfur, Tibet, the Russian incursion into Kosovo - all around are national ambitions to enlarge power.

To me, such facts refute the notion that Israel is singularly out of step. Israel is the blind focus regardless because of the same ancient rule: The Jews are hated because God is hated. The foundation of anti-semitism is jealousy. And that will not stop until the end of days.

Roslyn Weiss

July 19, 2010

Lehigh University

I read with great interest and appreciation your recent article, "Israel through European Eyes." Although I would like to accept the thesis of your article, I find myself doubting that Europe would react similarly to a Palestinian state. Doesn't Europe generally favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and, if it does, how can one say it is simply opposed to self-determining states per se? Moreover, one can only wonder what atrocities Europe would be willing to tolerate were they committed by a Palestinian state. Not to mention that it is more forgiving of the most heinous atrocities committed by all other states than it is of minor infractions by Israel.

It is difficult, in the final analysis, not to think that anti-Semitism is one important factor in European reactions to Israel (not to mention Arab countries' reactions), and that fear of the Islamic world is another.

Thank you for your thoughtful piece. I have read other articles of yours with much pleasure and profit (most recently the one about Herzl's Der Judenstaat in Azure).

Sammy Wechsler

July 19, 2010

N/A

Enjoyed your recent article. It was very thought provoking. My question though is why Israel? What about all the other nation states like Iran and North Korea which have much more aggressive agendas than Israel? Why doesn't Europe have a bigger problem with them?

Abraham Davidson

July 19, 2010

South Wales Jewish Community

I have read with great interest what you had to say in your Jerusalem Letter "Israel through European eyes".

The establishment of a new Paradigm you describe in your letter, will take a great amount of effort, a serious and devoted co-operation by a great number of people, and certainly a large amount of time which Israel and the Jewish people do not have.

A method that could speed up that process a little, and that could go hand in hand with your new Paradigm is:

The bringing to the attention of the world, the possible potential to the people of the region, and especially to the Palestinians, when true cooperation could be established with the state Israel.

Just imagine for a minute what that working together with Israel could do to the Palestinians people; do, to the whole region, and especially, to the negative attitude of the European and world nations towards Israel.

We have in the world an Organisation called C.U.F.I, Christians united for Israel, who do wonderful work of positive publicity for Israel.

What if we can find the people of Goodwill in the Moslem world, I am in no doubt that those people do exist....., and try and help organise a M.U.F.I...., I am under no illusion, of the many difficulties that could be encountered by such an organisation.

This could provide a great potential for true peace and prosperity for all the people of the region; and establish a balancing force to the many negative energies produced by Hamas, H'isballah, Iran, Syria and many others;........, if we can succeed in this endeavour, the effects in the eyes if the world could now be, almost unimaginable.

Pearl Luber Siegel

July 19, 2010

N/A

I enjoyed reading your article about how the Europeans view Israel. I think your proposal to change the paradigm will have to involve radically changing the Israeli establishment. The secular modern state of Israel seems to worship dealth and the shoah. No longer should foreign dignitaries be taken to Temple Yad Vashem to pay their homage. No longer should the history of the State of Israel begin from the 1920's.

Israel has to reassert the Divine Paradigm. It's history is over 3000 years old and Israel has a mission independant of Aushwitz.

Curt M. Biren

July 19, 2010

Kayne Anderson Rudnick

Great letter on the need for a paradigm shift! (It brings back memories from college when I read Kuhn’s book.)

Do you also think that there is a double standard – denying nationhood for Israel while at the same time embracing it for Palestinians and accepting it for Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries?

Pat Lotfinia

July 19, 2010

None

It is always a pleasure to have you bump me into thinking with your twists and turns. WOW! I like it. Since I am not Jewish, European, and haven't your background I accept your position as valid.

To carry your reasoning forward, if “Israel is Auschwitz.” Then in the Western Hemisphere Europe, and its spawn are the First Peoples Auschwitz. I agree. I now see it; their new distaste in nation-states is only an attempt to commit sepuku. “There is no God, we are monsters, we must for the good of the Earth- sepuku!” Right.

I do not wish such a fate upon Europe, or my own nation. What people in history have treated the weaker ones as equal human beings? What’s not needed are friendships with nation-states considering sepuku, out of collective guilt. What is needed is a change from collective guilt to a collective desire for life. If my own nation can’t deliver, due to that quilt, maybe Israel can provide such hope. Your people did survive the real Auschwitz, not to mention the Six-day war that resulted in my belief.

Thanks for the recommendation on Thomas Kuhn, it might be a help to me.

Dan Simon

July 19, 2010

N/A

I’m afraid no single, overarching explanation, such as philosophical objections to the concept of the nation-state, can account for the extraordinary strength and uniformity of Europe’s hostility to Israel. It doesn’t explain, for example, why the anti-Israel movement happily embraces a virulent Palestinian nationalism that exhibits all the traits—ethnic particularism, bitter historical grievance, maximalist irredentism, and even anti-Semitism—that have supposedly soured Europeans on nationalism in the first place.

In practice, international political campaigns such as the anti-Israel movement rarely achieve critical mass except by pulling together coalitions of multiple constituencies with compatible-but-distinct agendas. Consider, for example, the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Although there are plenty obvious reasons for finding apartheid morally objectionable, it was hardly the most appalling injustice on the planet—or even on its own continent—at the time. On the contrary, South African Blacks, while victims of systematic legal discrimination and segregation, were in material terms among the best off in Africa, and arguably no worse off politically than numerous ethnic groups—or even entire populations—in some of the more brutal African tyrannies. Why, then, did apartheid-era South Africa, uniquely among all causes, become an international cause célèbre?

The reason for its anomalous global significance is that at the time, it happened to fit the agendas of numerous political constituencies across the first world. To American liberals, it dovetailed nicely with their domestic racial political agenda, which was premised on the idea that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was not yet completed, and required further social transformations. To American leftists, it offered an opportunity to oppose a pro-Western bulwark in an Africa that was increasingly dominated by Soviet allies. And to European liberals and leftists, it fit nicely with several agenda items: anti-colonialism, support for immigrants from former African colonies, independence from Cold War-driven American foreign policy—and, as you say, internationalism, as represented by EU and UN activism.

Today, the anti-Israel movement in Europe similarly serves multiple agendas. In addition to the internationalists of whom you speak, it also caters to European opponents of American power (Israel being seen as a strong American ally); third-world romantics, anti-capitalists and other assorted opponents of modernism, of which Israel is a potent symbol; defenders of Europe’s contentious Muslim immigrant populations; and, of course, anti-Semites of various degrees and stripes. And once such a coalition takes off, it accumulates numerous hangers-on, swept along with the momentum of a popular movement.

I agree completely with you that the evolution of this coalition will take years or decades to play out, and that in the meantime, rational, fact-based defenses of Israel will have little purchase in Europe. But my analysis also suggests a countering strategy: the way to fight a broad coalition is with an opposing coalition. While the sentiments driving the anti-Israel coalition in Europe are certainly popular, they’re hardly universal, and to the extent that they can be turned into partisan fault lines rather than unifying visions, their power can be at least somewhat blunted. (This is in contrast to the situation in America, where support for Israel is more broad-based and has until recently been bipartisan. Turning Israel into a partisan issue there would be something of a deterioration, and though it may be inevitable, it’s to be avoided if at all possible.)

Supporters of Israel in Europe should therefore seek to align themselves with other opponents of the underlying agendas of the anti-Israel movement. An obvious category is the libertarian anti-multicultural movement, typified by personalities such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the late Pym Fortuyn in the Netherlands. Another is the pro-business constituency, which can point to the anti-Israel excesses of union activists as an example of the need to curb union power.

Such coalitions inevitably draw diverse, occasionally unappealing, and perhaps even unsavory allies. But until they recognize that they’re facing a problem of coalition politics, not political philosophy—much less moral reasoning—supporters of Israel are doomed to lose the battle against a well-organized, highly mobilized alliance.

Richard Propp

July 18, 2010

Bnai Sholom Reform Congregation, Albany, NY

As we say, fascinating, deep, and scary.I will read Kuhn's book.

Rafi Marom

July 18, 2010

N/A

My mother (z"l) told me that I should never complain and never explain. Your friends don't need it and your enemies wouldn't believe you. So, as to your concern that Israel might be "delegitimized" by its opponents, I can only answer, "what else is new." or, "nu." Arnold Toynbee said that we Jews are a "fossil" while others compare our actions to the nazis without the slightest idea of what the nazis did. Still others, such as Judt, feel embarrassed by our actions and reject the need to explain Israeli activities. Does this English-born American feel any need to justify either UK or US actions? I strongly doubt it, even though he is a citizen of both countries, yet, not of Israel. Perhaps his problems are far more serious than the end of Israel. He wouldn't be the first head case in academia. I think that you are too concerned about the world thinks of us. First, who really cares! We go about a daily routines without any thought to whether we are loved or not. Second, when we were far smaller and weaker, with an Arab boycott on us and anyone who would trade with us, there were companies that would deal with us. Thus, I will also drink Coca Cola and never Pepsi for that reason. And, in spite of his mob connections, Sinatra's very quiet aid to Israel long before it was fashionable, will always keep me as a fan. As it is written in the Tanakh, we are a people who are destined to live alone. At least we have our own destiny in our own hands for the first time in 2000 years and we dare anyone, anywhere to take that away from us. I fought in the Yom Kippur War on the Sinai-Egyptian(Africa) front and we knew that what we had with us, for all the reserves and equipment that we had were somewhere, we had no where to retreat, so our attitude was here we shall make our stand. There is nothing like such stark realities to truly focus a person on the task at hand. Yoram, I would not worry about grand philosophical theory and overarching historical connections. We live in the here and now and the fact that you have nine children and I have a child and a grandchild all living in our land should be proof enough that no one, no where will ever change the course of one of histories greatest miracles, the re-birth of Jewish sovereignty in our land. Communism is dead, nazism is kaput, the Muslims are going to destroy themselves in a paroxysm of blood and despair and we Israelis are building a mighty society in our homeland. Don't worry as we approach Tisha B'Av and the weeks before Tishri. All will be well, because we have educated our committed Jewish/Israeli children to their obligations.

Avraham Etzion

July 18, 2010

None

Your arguments seem very convincing.However
1)There has been a move all over the world to revert to national states-breakup of Yugoslavia into 3 states'breakup of Cyprus'breakdown of the big block of Ussr
the Kurds''the rebels in Spain'the Walloons in Belgium'the French Canadians.Due to economic crisis in Europe there is also talk of breakup of the European Union
Therefore I believe that your analysis overexaggerates the importance of the universal order
2 )If as you say there is anopposition to Israel fighting for national interest-why does this not apply to the Arab demand for national sovereignty?Why does the left
back that demand?

Mordechai Ben-Menachem

July 18, 2010

Yaroke Group Clean Energy Systems Ltd.

I congratulate you on a well-written and well-argued piece. As usual, it was indeed a pleasure to read and delve into your arguments and methods. Unfortunately, despite the excellence of the rhetoric, it is fatally flawed.
In reading it, I could not help but be reminded of the Pequot Wars. I remind you of the particulars:
a vagabond slaver and convicted criminal was killed, probably by members of the Pequot Tribe. Nobody really knows why. After he was killed, the British Colony decided to revenge his death. Genocide of the entire tribe, in the worst atrocity ever then seen in North America – over 1000 men, women and children slaughtered and others sold as slaves to Barbados. This then became the model for Europeans’ behaviour towards the ‘savages’ until the third decade of the twentieth century. Of course, Europeans viewed this as their right, as they were ‘civilized’ while the ‘Natives’ were ‘savages’.
If your model was correct, then the same European attitude taken, according to you, against Israel, would be taken against many others; certainly at least Turkey (Cyprus and Kurds), against many national groups recently to have created States, Slovenia, Slovakia, Macedonia and many others. Tens of examples refute your model.
You speak of two paradigms. I’ll give you a third. Chopin created beautiful music, but was a virulent antisemite. So too were many of the philosophers that you speak so respectfully of in the Euro-centric worldview. The truth is, the epitome of European philosophers remains Hitler. The Zeroth Paradigm, is the simplest. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Europe is as it always has been, barbaric and barbarically antisemitic. No other explanation is necessary. Your crying attempt to apologise for their attitude by once again blaming us, is weak, no matter how well argued. Just as the pathetic European attempt to cover their unwashed stench by French perfume was ineffective; they remained barbarians despite it.
I am a great fan of your book. Your first two ‘Letters’ were interesting. This one was an excellent read. But your Euro-centric, Liberal Arts education tries too hard to find excuses for them. They have not changed. What has changed is that Jews have a state, despite 17 centuries of attempts to exterminate us and to remain on top. Europe is over; done with. Yoram, welcome to the twenty-first century.

Ealon Joelson

July 18, 2010

N/A

I truly enjoyed your insightful essay. Your thinking on the non-specificity of “facts” mirrors conclusions I drew on the subject over 15 years ago while a pro-Israel activist at UC Berkeley.
But I would expand upon your argument in a somewhat different direction. Although the Europeans may have developed a framework against nationalist tendencies, they seem to have no problem with a Palestinian expression of national identity. Including when such expression assumes literal Nazi overtones, a position you indicate the Europeans most want to undermine. In my view, the European orientation toward an anti-Nationalist posture only seems to functionally extend to the Jews, but not anyone else.
In Europe an anti-Nationalist posture comes cheap because no-one (at least not presently) is threatening an internecine battle in Europe. Do you think a Russo-European alliance would have been proposed in the late 1980’s? Of course not, because everyone knows the totalitarian threat of the Soviets would have dominated Europe. But now that Europe is in some quixotic equipoise, its leaders (stupidly, in my opinion) not only presume they can legislate peace, but that everyone else must re-orient to the new European North Pole. And the rejoinder is not: “Unless you are the Jews”. The rejoinder is: “Unless you hate the Jews”. Apparently if that is the case, then: “we forgive you your nationalist endeavor, and by way-- have at those hooked-nosed bastards”.
The underpinning of my argument goes back to your presumption about paradigms. You have not recognized the predominant paradigm of the European West as it relates to Jews: good old-fashioned Jew hatred. It is a predominant theme throughout the European West and Muslim World. It is part of the social glue that holds those societies together and is an inescapable part of the European paradigm. Although the Holocaust gave Jews a temporary respite, please don’t confuse a return of Europe to its old ways as “ a new paradigm” about how it relates to Israel; but rather recognize it as the old paradigm of how Europe sees Jews: subservient and delegitimized as the followers of an outmoded religion. Israel’s existence is a cultural offense to European Christians (and the Muslim World) because the Jewish State’s simple existence belies the assertion that Jews are discredited. (Parenthetically, I should make note that the USA—either governmentally or socially-- never fostered such anti-Semitism and it should be no wonder today that the support of Israel here is the highest among all Western nations).
But now Europeans can reap a double dividend on their anti-Semitism. Not only can they repudiate the Jew under traditional terms, but they can salve their collective guilty conscience. They can claim: “the excesses of Europe against the Jews were not so bad, look at how the Jews are just like Nazis”.
To some extent you try to put the phenomenology of anti-Israelism into a logical framework. But in fact there is no such logic. We are simply playing the same role we always have for Europe and the Muslim World.

Luis Tellez

July 17, 2010

N/A

I found your letter below riveting; I had never thought of Israel and the Jews in these terms; and you make a very compelling argument. Many thanks for sharing it. Since the world around us does not provide a framework neither for ideas or institutions, it is very important to hear arguments such as yours to help us think through it all, to help us understand where we are. I don't much like where we are and I am still hoping it is better than where we have been for some time now for whereas institutionally the academy is bankrupt, there are new voices emerging; let us hope and pray it is not too late.

Moshe Polon

July 17, 2010

Kollel Yechiel Yehuda

Regarding your essay, two comments: 1. The Ben Gurion quotation supports the notion that Israel's exists as a political or national entity, the same way (as you point out) that England or France exists or existed. Viewed only as a political entity in an environment that rejects nationalism, Israel's legitimacy as a fully sovereign state is naturally questionable as that of Luxembourg's. So there's something wrong with paradigm "A," namely, the Jewish state must be viewed as a sovereign, political entity whose purpose is to prevent another Auschwitz. What's wrong with it is that it divorces Israel (and here I mean the Jewish People and the Land of Israel) from God.2. Tell me why the first Rashi in Bereishis (Rebbe Yitzchok) doesn't provide clarity? Is that not the only paradigm for us? They say we are thieves ("listim") and worse. We know from where our deed to the Land came from. Some paradigms are eternal. Kuhn wasn't writing about those. That's why referring to him doesn't take us very far.

Michael D. University of Washington

July 17, 2010

N/A

I agree with much of what you stated in your article and have recently thought that how we are framing the argument about Israel is not working. As I have looked at the world after 9/11, the paradigm I have been thinking about is the following: “Western civilization is good and must be preserved. It is under attack and its very existence greatly threatened by Islamic radicalism. Israel is on the front lines of this battle for Western civilization and must be defended. If it falls, so too will the West”.

Roberta E. Dzubow

July 16, 2010

N/A

A friend, sent me your essay. I read it very, very carefully. I think it is a brilliant assessment and your explanations leave me enormously upset. Just to illustrate how deeply shaken I am, I have made several spelling errors and have had to retype even words in my introductory sentence.

I now understand why all the letters I write, the calls I make, the careful vigilance I maintain defending Israel, never really accomplishes what I want to see. It is a non-stop task and it takes unending energy. My friends and I have discussed this many, many times. I don't know how the paradigm can be shifted back to the belief in the sovereign state, and Israel's legitimacy recognized. What you described is more formidable than what I felt I was always fighting.

I always believed that the oil-rich Arabs/Muslims stoked the worldwide hatred of Israel. Their front groups, public relations campaigns, lawyers,"friends in high places," their cultivating/buying off or intimidating reporters, all this combined to constantly undermine Israel and sully Israelis and Jews. Arab endowments on university campuses have paid off very well for them and anti-Israel sentiments abound. Universities now swarm with pro-Muslim Leftists who later infiltrate everwhere. From your article, I now know why those with little patriotism steer the US government. That of course describes Obama.

It amazes me that with all of the incredible violence coming from Islamic fanatics, daily, the "disconnect" from these stories continues. Arab atrocities are mentioned and then off the radar screen - not like Israeli actions which are dissected, criticized, always front and center. You have explained why that is so. Now, how to change that perception? And what an enormous task.

78% of the Jews voted for Obama, and still give him "a pass." My hope is that the wonderful Christian Zionists will work hard to slow down this snowball of stupidity and hate. "Put not your faith in princes" still holds. I hope the TEA party people, trying hard to throw out the Leftists, defend the US and enforce States Rights, save Democracy, Israel, and therefore the world.

Thank you for your very good work.

Zeev Maghen

July 16, 2010

Shalem Center

Awesome and true, Yoram. This is a HUGE contribution.

Josef Joffe

July 16, 2010

Die Zeit

A very fine and learned piece, but, I am afraid, not fully on target. If Kantianism as counter-paradigm to Westphalia were the critical independent variable, then ALL nation-states would be delegitimized, not just Israel. But it ain’t so. Nobody questions the statehood of Libya, Croatia, Brunei or any of the Arab states, including Islamic states like Pakistan, which are artificial colonial constructions; ditto throughout Africa. But their Westphalian nature is sacrosanct, which is why we intervene very rarely to stop the mayhem. (Serbia is the exception; Iraq was a strategic war with the icing of democracy-promotion.) Very simple and closest to home: Palestine’s nationhood is a sacred cause of the rest of the world. Nobody is telling the Palys: You’re ahistorical, as Judt told Israel.

You might respond: Yes, but what about Europe? Tricky, but no cigar. With all of the EU’s supranationalism, these 27 are nation-states (well, minus Belgium) who are not even dreaming about given up core sovereignty, such as over fiscal, defense and foreign policy, and the farther East you go, the fiercer the nationalism. (Isaiah Berlin explains it with his concept of “bent-twig nationalism”.)

In short, there is no delegitimization of the nation-state as such. How could there be if its number has grown from 45 to 200 since World War II. There is only one state that is being delegitimized, and that is Israel. There is indeed a paradigm shift: from Nazi victim to Nazi perpetrator. And that requires a different explanation, on strictly logical grounds, than neo-Kantianism. It couldn’t be paleo-Kantianism because only in the 19th and early 20th century did integralist nationalism celebrate its greatest triumph.

Hugh Lefcort

July 16, 2010

Gonzaga University

As a scientist I particularly enjoyed your article. I have made two discoveries in my career and I tried to bury both of them until reviewers forced me to see. You add another argument to the ideas represented in OF Paradise and Power by Kagan.

I guess one consolation is that the collapse of the European welfare state may lead to a return to nation states.

First, thank you for reminding me of Thomas Kuhn's book- I read it as a graduate student in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley, and if I recall (this was almost 40 years ago), I wrote a paper on it for a seminar I was taking. So, thanks. I remember the main points quite well, and it is a pleasure to see someone speaking about these ideas again.

Second, might you think that if paradigm shifts are so difficult (if sometimes sudden), that Israelis might well feel (justifiably,
perhaps) that there is little reason to pay heed to those Europeans (I would certainly exclude Russia here) who believe in the beneficial outcome of the demise of the nation state? Why not just do what she has to do to provide security for her citizens, and (excuse me) to hell with what the Europeans (and some Americans) think?

Well, I suppose I would not go that far. Israel is dependent on trade and exports for her economic well-being, and nations that are isolationists are in some way the evil twin of those which are dismissive of the nation state.

I look forward to your ideas on how to approach this problem.

Alan Barton

July 16, 2010

N/A

Thank you for your most recent letter, which I find most thought provoking. While I appreciate your shifting paradigm thesis in the world of physical science, I question it's application to something so intangible that it is more akin to a topic of social science. Please consider the following observations about current European attitudes toward Israel.

1. European attitudes toward Israel are still powerfully shaped by latent and overt anti-semitism, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. While European countries, with the exception of Britain and France, have few Jewish citizens, it's clear from history that the presence of Jews is not a prerequisite for existence of anti- semitism.

2. Europe's original attitude toward the foundation of Israel was influenced by guilt over the Holocaust and historic anti-semitism. In this regard, many non-German Europeans were overtly complicit in the decimation of European Jewry. While the founding of Israel assuaged this guilt, it also had the ancillary effect of removing most of the remaining Jews from Europe, whose presence had been a continuing reminder of Europe's despicable treatment of its Jewish citizens.

3. As you point out in your letter, the existence of Israel shifted the responsibility for the protection of the Jews from Europe to Israel. One might even suggest that some Europeans felt "good riddance" to that unwanted obligation. This shifting, however, produced a very robust defensive capability, which in many cases required an offensive component (e.g., Operation Cast Lead) as well as unavoidable consequences (e.g., check-points, the defensive wall and the Gaza blockade as well as deaths and injuries to non-combatants as an incident to military activities). This, Europeans do not like because they are at least responsible in part for Israel's existence and its consequent robust defensive and offensive activities.

4. While Europe once viewed the Jews as victims, they have been supplanted by the Palestinians as victims of Israel's policies. Thus, the Palestinians have become the new "Jews." Guess who the Israelis have become in the eyes of Europe?

5. Europeans are powerfully influenced in their view of Israel and Jews by the Muslims in their midst. Most importantly, European Muslims are responsible for the dilution of European culture in many countries, which is now widely decried throughout Europe. Some followers of Islam (many young and in some cases radical groups) have
engaged in violence and threaten to continue violent activities. Europeans have not figured out how to deal with this Islamist influence and are grasping for means to do so. So far, this effort by European leaders has been ineffectual, but these efforts include adopting anti-Israel policies and speaking out in favor of the Palestinians and in opposition to Israel. It's no secret that these efforts have incited widespread anti-semitic episodes and attitudes.

6. Much of Europe continues to rely on oil from the Mid-East for its energy needs. Arab and Iranian attitudes toward Israel exacerbate the energy dependence problem of a Europe that does not actively support the desires of the Palestinian people. By the way, it's easy for Europeans to mouth platitudes about a two state solution and ignore the fact that Palestinian attitudes specifically and Arab attitudes generally will never accept a Jewish state in what is now Israel.

This is an excellent essay. I like in particular the placing in the context of Kuhn's approach. I would add that superimposed on what you wrote there is the Jewish particularism: who are those Jews that they of all people think it is appropriate to create and maintain a Jewish national identity. Not only in the context of Islam where Jews were officially 'second class' but we know that even enlightened European scholars said that emancipation means 'all to the Jews as individuals but nothing as a national entity'.

But more often even the individual Jews were, in Europe, a second class and victims. Their 'blood and property was free'. This has imprinted itself not only on history but on much of European literature.
Because of this history and collective European memory of Jewish inferiority in Europe, the gap between the Jew as the victim to be at most have pity on, and a Jew as equal not only as individual but also within a national sovereign Jewish identity, is to much to bear for the European, perhaps sometime subconsciously.

This is reflected everywhere. The British Guardian, or the French Le Monde, are very sympathetic when they write about the holocaust and where the Jews play the role of the victim but manisfestly anti-Israel otherwise. In the Arab mind it is reflected many times, like the recent Palestinian Arab journalist interviewed on the BBC who referred to the first Jews who left the walls of Jerusalem to build outside, they, he said, have asked the permission of the Muslim Ottoman authority, and this is how it should be, he said.

The recent group of activists who were acquited by a judge and jury in the UK, after they have ransacked a factory which, they said (wrongly, but this is irrelevant), send material to Israel, is a beginning of a situation akin to Nazi Germany where officialdom, as distinct of the 'street', turns against the National Jew. In that sense UK is becoming a lawless society. The consideration given to the proposed omission of holocaust studies since it might omit Muslim sensibility, is also pointing in this direction.

Sally F. Zerker

July 15, 2010

York University

I find the use of Kuhn very instructive, but I'm not convinced by your designation of the current European paradigm. In the first place, there is still plenty of doubt that the EU will hang together now that Germany has to bail out Greece and perhaps others as their economies buckle under. But also important is that the national sentiment seems to prevail wherever and whenever there is an international function, like the recent soccer tournament. I find that the more appropriate paradigm in the attacks on Israel is that old-fashioned leftist obsession with imperialism, even then there is no possible existence of imperial power. Hence, the emphasis on occupation, racist oppression, and so on. Just a thought!

I read and enjoyed your article. I have one basic critique: Why then do the Europeans support an independent Palestine?

Roar Sørensen

July 15, 2010

N/A

Thank you so much for this very enlightening article. I have pondered the question why facts seem to be irrelevant when it comes to Israel and not reached a satisfactory answer. Your article is very helpful.

Cathy L Felix

July 15, 2010

N/A

Brilliant article on the new paradigm of the West and Israel! I enjoyed it very much.Thank you.

Rabbi Dr. Avraham Walfish

July 15, 2010

N/A

An interesting thesis, and I learned a lot from your letter about the history of attitudes towards the nation state. However, it seems to me that - as usual - the opposition to the idea of the nation state is not applied symmetrically. Where have we heard condemnation of Palestinian nationalism? According to your logic, the same revulsion to Israeli nationalism, as an illegitimate offshoot of Auschwitz, should carry over to the national aspirations of the perceived victims of Israeli "Nazism", namely the Palestinians. I would submit, therefore, that the European paradigm shift is far less thoroughgoing than you have claimed. There are "disadvantaged" nations whose right to a nation state is inalienable, and there are "colonialist" nations which ought to be dismantled. Yet even within this somewhat messier paradigm, there seem to be some who are more equal than others. Of all the nations whose right to existence may be called into question, it seems that only one deserves constant condemnation, and it seems that of all the ethnic groups clamoring for their own nation, only one of them elicits automatic sympathy and approval. Isn't good old-fashioned anti-semitism, perhaps with a healthy dose of petro-dollars, the paradigm closest to explaining this phenomenon?

Josiah Rotenberg

July 15, 2010

Monarch Alternative Capital Israel LTD

I was about to write that I enjoyed your most recent essay in Jerusalem Letters, but given the content, that is not the correct way to express myself. Perhaps it would be better to say I appreciate your insightful and succinct analysis of the problem we are facing in Israel today, it puts an intellectual framework around my much more amorphous thoughts on the matter.

Israel of course only being the state most endangered by the “paradigm” shift you are describing. I hope that we will have intellectual allies in this struggle in the western world and in the United States in particular. I certainly don’t have any insight into the Chinese, Indian or Russian intellectual scene, but it would seem that in a peculiar way those states remain committed to the concept of the state or of national existence, such that they should be natural allies against both the advocates of the EU or Islamism. On the more mundane field of day-to-day political struggles, that may not be the case, but at some point they should come around to that point. In particular, all three are struggling with Islamic movements.

Given that you are talking about a long term intellectual campaign, I wonder whether or not there is room to enlist non-western intellectuals in the struggle.

Thanks again for the essay that I didn’t enjoy reading.

Gil Weinreich

July 15, 2010

N/A

Your insight about the internationalist paradigm shift is clearly correct. Many a skilled pro-Israel advocate has been frustrated by the inability to successfully marshal history, facts and law to defend Israel. Yes, Israel is the lawful power in its territory under the League of Nations’ mandate and all subsequent international treaties. Yes, Israel is the legal administrator of the unallocated portions of Mandate territories that it has won in defensive wars against Arab aggressors. Yes, Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries was matched by Arab immigration, in response to economic opportunities in a previously barren land. Israel’s superior legal claims have failed to impress foreign chancelleries, with their international law experts on staff, or elite opinion in the media and universities because these arguments are interpreted through the current dominant paradigm, which opposes the nation-state.

I believe it is time for supporters of Israel to reference a new paradigm, which is really the oldest recorded paradigm: Namely, that the Jewish people hold title to the Land of Israel because God gave it to them as their eternal possession. The virtues of this argument should be self-evident. While not everyone respects the League of Nations, the UN or the world’s great powers, the Almighty is widely acknowledged by most people, if only reluctantly or for reasons of political expedience. What’s more, the Bible documents in great detail God’s intentions for the Land of Israel. Not only do both Judaism and Christianity affirm this countless times, but so does Islam. A Muslim who is faithful to his religion should actually be an ardent Zionist (see Qur’an 5:21 and 17:104).

The medieval Jewish commentator Shlomo Yitzchaki (also known as Rashi) famously explained why the book of Genesis, which is primarily about the birth and development of the Jewish people, begins with the Creation. He argued it was to show irrefutably that God is the ultimate landlord who created the world and can assign territory to whomever he wishes.

So the next time someone like Helen Thomas tells Jews they ought to go back to Poland or Germany, or Barack Obama questions a Jew’s right to live in Jerusalem, Jews can proudly remind them that title to their land comes from the highest possible source, is well documented by most of the world’s people and that no nation is in possession of superior claims. If an American can live in Washington, D.C. or Chicago, let alone Hawaii, then Jewish sovereignty in Israel is beyond reproach.

Will this convince the world? Not likely. But if it convinces Jews, then it is an answer to the problem of Zionist dissolution.

David Seodman

July 15, 2010

Northwestern University

This is the clearest and most insightful discussion I have read about Israel’s current situation in a very long time.As a scientist I know well how difficult it is for a scientist to move very far from the paradigm’s he believes to the absolute truth.

Col hakavod to you.

Gideon Rappaport

July 15, 2010

N/A

I received your piece called "Israel Through European Eyes" and found it impressive. Its introduction is quite correct. However, there are several important elements missing in the rest of the discussion, which, however, has much to recommend it.

1. The vilification of Jews and the idea of a Jewish state was already rife in European thought long before the particular paradigm shift you write about. Therefore I conclude that Europe has turned against Israel at least as much because it is a state belonging to the Jews as because it is a state attempting to determine its own destiny. Evidence includes the fact that no other nation-state that currently is struggling to establish its own independent self-determination (say, Cuba or Turkey or Venezuela or China or the Tibet of the Dalai Lama) is vilified as Israel has been. The paradigm you are singling out as the enemy of Israel's existence is in fact a greater one than you propose, namely the paradigm of a secular, rationalist, anti-theistic, world without guilt or divine judgment or God. It is this paradigm, like the Jew-hating stream within the universalist Christian paradigm before it, that cannot abide the Jews and their state, no matter what particular political paradigm is prevailing beneath it.

2. You have also left out of your discussion the Islamist paradigm of world domination by an Arab Muslim caliphate and sharia law, which uses whatever corrupt Western ideas it can lay hold of to advance a completely other paradigm, against which too the Europeans, despite the paradigm you observe, do not take a stand. And it is not because Islamization promises any Kantian universal morality as you seem to say that the European Unionists imagine their empire will. It is because the European paradigm is rooted in dependency, cowardice, and self-indulgence of every kind, not in universalist Kantian morality.

3. Kant was a moralist. And though his hope for a universal morality to be sustained by an empire was unfortunate, he was also a believer in God. The paradigm you are observing must not be laid at his door, but rather at the door of Rousseau and Nietzsche.

4. In your historical analysis, you left out Napoleon, who represents an oxymoronic uniting of the imperial aspirations with the spread (with his fall) of state nationalism. This is a complex historical matter and it could use some attention. Napoleon has the same pretension to the empire as Hitler later. To skip from the Holy Roman Empire to Hitler without reference to the French Revolution and Napoleon is to thin the argument too much.

5. Finally, the reason I make the above points is that it would be terribly dangerous to imagine that only the paradigm you articulate is the enemy. To marshal all our intellectual and moral resources as Jews against that particular opposite would be to mistake a battle (albeit a huge one) for the war. Israel must fight for its statehood against the European notion of borderless world government or domination, true. But to imagine that that effete idea is the only enemy of its existence is to be lulled into a false sense of the danger. You are quite right to point to this paradigm as our enemy. But it is not enough to say. There are other and worse paradigms competing with it and fueled by far greater and older passions and commitments. What Europeans are on the front lines (except headlines) fighting and dying to destroy Israel in the name of the European Union? No, it is the Islamists, the communist/socialist/leftists, and the God-haters of the world, with much older and even less savory paradigms, who have inherited the mantle of Jew hatred and are aiming at the existence of Israel. You are quite right that the new political paradigm of Europe is the enemy of Israel. But it is a shallow, spiritless, sinking enemy. Europe is not reproducing itself, even that absurd EU self. It is sinking under the weight of its own self-indulgence into the arms of the Muslim workers it has invited in to support its entitlement habit.

But I thank you, despite all my cavils, for being willing to raise the question and to remind us that it is not a war of facts against ignorance but a war of fundamental ideas. This is profoundly true and needs to be recognized.

Fred Ehrman

July 15, 2010

BMI Capital

A terrific read and an interesting thesis. The two paradigms that are presented, the nation-state versus a conglomeration of peoples (the EU), is offered as the answer to why Israel is viewed so negatively by much of the continent to its north. However I think the proposition is somewhat simplistic. Answer the following: If Israel were not a Jewish State, but a nation of Muslims or Catholics or Animists, would the Europeans have targeted this sliver of land in the same way? Doesn’t anti-Semitism play a major role in what is going on? For decades Gentiles in Poland or France or Germany in the 19th and first part of the 20th century yelled at the Jew, “why don’t you go to Palestine?” And now after a little more than half a century many seethe through their lips, as Helen Thomas did, saying “why don’t you go back to Poland and Germany where you came from?” As for the European Union, I don’t give that body a half century of life. How long will the hard-working German tolerate the easy going Greek or Portuguese’s lifestyle and hand over their hard earned Euro’s to bail out the southerner’s profligate ways?My own thinking is that trends of this sort work in cycles. The current rage of the globalization of peoples is a reaction to the 50 million dead of World War Two which was perceived a result of the nation –state gone mad with the goal of domination. The Third Reich and Imperial Japan caused a great revulsion towards nationalism. Much the same happened as a result of the 16 million killed in World War One in only one theater of combat. Woodrow Wilson felt that the world had to be made “safe for democracy” and the League of Nations was born. That venture failed as has sadly the United Nations.Ultimately I believe the human being is a tribal animal and will always tend towards his own kind. There will be blips in history of attempts to enlarge the scope of amity and tolerance for those who are different, especially after a savage period of killings, but ultimately the individual will tend towards “min b’mino”, his own kind. At least until the End of Days when the mighty roar and the b-a-a-a will make its own symphony.As to what Israel should do in this trying period, I agree with you that it is not a matter of better P.R. The age old hatred is too powerful. Israel has to defend its citizens, conduct itself in the “Jewish way”, with purity of arms in war and with Chesed to the rest of humanity in times of peace (e.g. Haiti and medical care to the sick Gaza child) and pray to the One above that “He will not slumber nor sleep.”

Yaakov Arram

July 15, 2010

N/A

Firstly, you deserve to be congratulated on (yet another) excellent piece of analysis. I think you're totally correct in thinking that the paradigm is central, and not the "facts".There was always something flawed in Zionism that merely sought to be a Jewish flavour of what the goyim were doing (whether it be Revisionist Nation-State, or Zionist-Socialism, or Borochov's Jewishproletariat.) I know that you maintain that the idea of a nation-state is a Jewish idea, but that's not how Zionism, and the State of Israel has related to it.The counter-paradigm must be something that is first and foremost something authentically Jewish, and ideally something that can put the spotlight, and pressure on the "Europeans". Of course there really is no such thing as a European, meaning that really there is no such spiritual entity, just like there is no spiritual basis for a non-language like Esperanto.Anyway, it seems to me that the defining idea of the Jewish people (and our challenge to the world), is the building of God's Temple on earth. The recognition that physical reality is a reflection of higher, spiritual realities, and that man has no existence, let alone a right to that existence, without God.

Bob Horenstein

July 15, 2010

Jewish Federation of Greater Portland

This is an incredibly thought-provoking essay and you are to be commended for its brilliance. But I do have one simple question: If this European paradigm includes the belief that the nation-state is intrinsically immoral, then why does the European Union advocate so strongly for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state?

Christopher Sanderson

July 15, 2010

Yale University

As much as I loved the research, learned much, and enjoyed a lot of the thought in the Letter I have to tell you: if you and I had been given this letter in High School, we’d have stomped on the flawed logic pretty quickly. The link in the logic that conflates the European Union with Nazi Germany is week – a simple assertion. And, since it is a bad link to begin with, everything after that succumbs to the fallacy of the straw man.

Do I have to spell this stuff out? I guess so. The EU has no military force of its own; the EU makes no claim to supplant the highest courts of its member nations. It can’t force its member nations to comply; it is largely an economic compact. Or, to address the thing that seems to upset you the most, the EU asks nations to submit of a rule of law between themselves only insofar as its member nations laws cannot mediate between said nations to begin with. Even then, it is without military force. It is an entirely weaker entity than you suppose – in fact, stipulate – in your argument here. And, there’s the logical
problem: that link has no support.

But, let’s take this straw man argument to its logical conclusion. Why don’t you propose a Middle Eastern Union? No one - not Arab, Iranian, or otherwise - would allow it to be headquartered anywhere else but in Jerusalem, within the borders of the sovereign state of Israel. Why not have Israeli politicians propose a Middle Eastern Union for the economic betterment and peaceful co-existence of its member nations?

You and I know that the Arab nations would go berserk. And, they’d have to admit why they were going berserk about it; they don’t want peaceful co-existence with Israel. Their paradigm now is about patiently waiting until they can destroy Israel. Despite the obvious benefits of joining the new world paradigm of union, they’d have no part of it. Perhaps that would allow diplomacy to get more to the crux of the problem in the short term. At least, Israel would look great by doing it. In the long run, the power of the new paradigm you outline would take over; the union would be inevitable. And another layer of protection for Israel’s children would be in place and in Israel’s control. Norway proves that contiguous nation-states can reject union and deal with it as a separate stat entirely. If Israel wants to leave, it can leave. But, it has to be included for the idea of union in the region to have any legitimacy.

In all of your examples, once the paradigm had shifted, there was no going back. We’re seeing it in physics in this new idea that gravity is a side effect; that it doesn’t exist separately as a force. France still exists in the new paradigm of union, for better or worse (and let me remind you, their intelligence leaks have not been of the “better” for the US). Perhaps it is worth looking at how the paradigm of union plays out with the guaranteed existence of Israel, too, "logical conclusion" or no.

This is because your point that a new paradigm takes over quickly in terms of generations is accurate, of course - more good scholarship.
And, yes, it does have to be discussed from all sides in schools. And, yes, I will go pick up a copy of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Thanks, professor. You’re going to have a lovely Liberal Arts college, I am sure. I hope it has many Liberals and much Arts.

Stanley B. Stern

July 15, 2010

Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

What the article does not address (I believe) is why the same Europeans embrace Islam and Islamic groups who also appear to be the anthesis of a universalistic culture to a much greater degree than Israel/jews and do so in an extreme and repressive manner.
In fact, to be extreme for a bit Islam is the perfect universalistic culture, albeit under ONLY their (sick) rules.

Doug Altabef

July 15, 2010

N/A

Thanks for the insightful article.

Your piece rings true, but as my friend Mitch Lubart (to whom I forwarded it, and who sent you a reply) comments, also incomplete.

At Marty Peretz's suggestion somewhere, I am slogging through Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt. As a card carrying French intellectual, Bruckner sees clearly how the Jews have been dumped as the "Queen for a Day" victims in favor of the Palestinians. In his view the hatred of Israel -and increasingly of Jews - is all related to the ongoing expiation and self-hate of the Europeans. Complicated how the need for continued Jew-hatred is tied to the continuous sense of expiation, of remorse, but he certainly believes they are related.

In terms of paradigms, I would say that somewhere between 1967 and after the Yom Kippur War, the paradigm shift on Israel consisted of letting go of the concern for the viability of a bedraggled people buffeted by the incredibly cruel winds of History, and resentment for the success of those people which allowed them to replicate the mistakes of the European past - nationalism.

Unbeknownst to us sitting comfortably in the US, this transition date was the closing act for the Golden Respite of Jewry, the a-historical anomaly which began in 1945. Slowly but inexorably, we were going to be lowered back into the soup of History.

But as Mitch points out, the all-weather, ever enduring completely wack-a-ding narrative of anti-Semitism is so durable, consistent and widespread as to beg the question of how is this possible.

It is starting to gnaw at me that perhaps Divine Providence is at work. Is it possible that in His love for the Jewish People and His desire to ensure the eternal status - on the ground - of His covenant with us, that He has infected the nations with Anti-Semitism as a way of keeping us Jews?

We are after all the stiff necked people who left to our own devices would seem to be quite unworthy of an eternal covenant. Our DNA has given us great immunity to coercion, but none to serenity.

Could it be that the real paradigm shift we are seeing is the return to the old normal - widespread, articulated, acted upon Jew hatred? I am struck by how quickly the "I'm not an anti-Semite, I am just anti-Israel" mindset is morphing into tried and true anti-Semitism.

I do believe that Israel is the canary on the mine cage of Western Civ, and the willingness to throw us to the dogs is ultimately going to be at least as big an issue for the West as it is for us.

That is one reason we made aliyah last summer. I am more confident putting my and my progeny's chips on Israel, regardless of the paradigm.

Malcolm Lowe

July 15, 2010

Ecumenical Research Fraternity

Some comments to your excellent discussion of the paradigms within which Israel is viewed by contemporary intellectuals.

1. Kuhn's book has to be read not in the original edition of 1962 but in the second edition of 1970. In the latter's Postscript of 1969, Kuhn responds to important criticisms of his initial position. In particular, he admits that he had used the term "paradigm" in two major distinct senses. One is the paradigm in the sense of a major piece of scientific work, such as Newton's Principia. The other is the paradigm in the sense of your article; the Postscript adds important elucidations of this conception.

2. Essential reading, besides Kuhn, is the less popularly known work of Imre Lakatos on the competition between scientific research programs. Lakatos was a personal friend of mine. Without him, moreover, I might never have been able to come to Israel.

3. The rivalry between the ideas of the independent nation and the multinational superstate is much more ancient than you suggest. You will find it in the argument between Arminius and his brother Flavus, who remained totally loyal to Rome, in the Annals of Tacitus II.9-10. Everything is said there in nuce.

4. Consequently, this is an argument that has being going on since time immemorial, with now one side and now the other gaining or losing ground. For instance, the crisis of the Euro, which is far from settled at the moment, could lead to a fresh swing away from the supernational ideal. In the UK there continues to be widespread antipathy to EU interference, and in Germany, of course, the public never wanted the Euro. These and other factors could lead, in the not too distant future, to a distinct weakening of the appeal of the paradigm unsympathetic toward Israel.

5. The message for Israel is that sooner or later, for whatever reason, this millennially swinging balance will swing back toward recognizing the advantages of national independence. So Israel has to do everything necessary to survive until that happens. That includes refusing to be deterred from maintaining its essential strengths, indeed forcefully maintaining them despite criticism. And because this is a battle of ideas that will never end, Israel will always find sympathy from supporters of the contrary position.

6. Indeed, precisely Israel may contribute significantly to the reverse swing by demonstrating its advantages as an advanced modern state with considerable independence. An example is how Israel succeeded in flying through the global economic crisis almost unscathed. (It annoys me that nobody gives the credit for this to the economic reforms introduced by Netanyahu during his premiership of 1996-1999. Without them, Israel might have gone down in the economic crisis in SE Asia - remember that? - or in the Second Intifada. He saved this country by what he did in those years, yet the paradigm that dominates media perceptions reviles his record in those years with gross ingratitude.)

7. You speak of the paradigms that govern the attitudes of intellectuals to Israel, thus ones that operate in the area of academia and its echoes in the so-called quality press. Fortunately, there are many other areas of modern public life in which other paradigms operate.

8. Governments, for instance, do not allow themselves to be dictated to by intellectuals. Rather, every level of government is a potential source of opposition to supernational ideas, since it operates on behalf of a particular population unit. The recent acceptance of Israel into the OECD is a fact of major importance, the most important for Israel in many years, since: a) it took place despite all the political agitation against Israel, showing that the governments that voted Israel in were guided by other interests; b) it will bring profound longterm advantages to for Israel's already powerful economy.

9. This also goes far to explaining how Israel's international status deteriorated precisely each time after the Oslo agreements and the withdrawals from South Lebanon and Gaza. The paradigms that guide governments include respect for power and strength, despite personal distaste.

10. The almost total failure of Israel's official public relations is due, of course, to the inadequate paradigms that govern it. It is nonsense to say that there is no English word for hasbarah; there is one - "apologetics." The success of the Palestinians and their supporters is due to their concentration not on apologetics but on attacking Israel wherever, whenever and however. I have tried to explain this time and again to Israeli officials, but without finding any understanding, of course.

11. The greater success of such organizations as PMW, NGO Monitor and CAMERA, despite limited budgets, comes about because they go beyond mere apologetics into paradigm-bashing and paradigm-smashing. For instance, one has to beyond merely refuting the claims of individual NGOs into establishing a general perception of them as groups of self-important, ignorant, malicious and mendacious individuals undeserving of the public money that they waste, much of it on their own selves. Likewise, one should promote a just perception of the UN as a bunch of money-consuming organizations only a few of which, such as the WHO and UNESCO, do anything to deserve not being scrapped.

Menachem Zupnik

July 15, 2010

B.T.U.

This letter was particularly brilliant. The new paradigm that you suggest is the basic view of Israel before anything happens is very convincing. However the double standard still exists independent of this analysis. It would seem that the Palestinians, who would like to establish their own nation state, are also guilty of the same crime. How do we understand the fact that Israel is hated because it’s existence is essentially a paradigm that has fallen out of vogue, while the Palestinians pursue the same nation- state and are accepted? In addition we might add, that their agenda is indeed very similar to the Nazi agenda, and would not even allow for your comment that the association with a nation-state and Nazism is preposterous. In their case the association is abundantly clear. Yet no one is disgusted with their aspirations.
So it seems to me we have to still rely on the same old existence of anti Semitism under the veneer of every otherwise reasonable people of the world, to explain the present state of affairs. And that unfortunately , despite the depth and truths in your thesis, brings us back to square one.
I suggest that the paradigm that they view Israel is the same old concept and paradigm in regard to a jew. As Bibi put it . They have always been guilty until proven guilty. And facts and reason never helped for that paradigm either .

J.Marvin Spiegelman

July 14, 2010

Private Psychoanalytic Practice

Many thanks for this insightful analysis of an obviously absurd world situation. I have had something similar going on in my own thoughts, based on a kind of diagram that Jung once used to describe differences among people, nations, etc. It involves, let us say, a person's psyche resting on increasingly collective layers, namely ego, on family, on place on nation, on ethnic group, on humankind, on animal kind, on plants and organic life, on matter, on energy and the Source of all. I see the issue you are dealing with as the quarrel between those whose emphasis is on national identification as opposed to those who primary identification is with humankind. Each despises the other, alas. But these are opposites, another variant of the old Trotsky versus Stalin battle (international communism versus state communism) among many others. Your analysis is especially cogent and I am grateful for it. I also look forward to your further thoughts as to a solution to this deathly opposition. My own solution lies in extending consciousness about what is happening and you are surely doing this as well.

Michael Phillips

July 14, 2010

Pro Commerce

Yoram Hazony, a brilliant Israeli intellectual, whom I fully respect, has made the claim that the intractable hatred of Israel (Jew-hate) that is found extensively on the Left and throughout Europe is subject to two intellectual forces.

One, is Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace that most Europeans and Lefties accept.... that nationhood is an evil that must be avoided or eliminated. Europeans now believe they have achieved that with the emergent European Union. This thesis demands that Israel should disappear as a state. States are anathema to peace.

Two, is Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution, in which Kuhn shows that major concepts and paradigms such as Kant's anti-nationhood, only lose power when its supporters die off.

Therefore Israel needs to train a new generation in a new concept/paradigm and wait for the current generation of Israel-Jew-haters to die off.

I would argue that Kant's view of the nation-state is based on an immature historic view. In the idea forming period of his life there were no modern nation states, only empires old and new. The United States was an experiment late in his life. The same is true for Marxism; historically immature ideas based on a nearly non-existent world of modern commerce that was yet to arrive. European intellectuals should be reminded of that historic fact.

If Kant is a serious problem and belief in the European Union is also a serious problem, then arguments in support of the nation-state are necessary. The most powerful argument becomes Israel itself, as a bastion of self-defense. Other examples are Tibet, which had no effective defense or alliances. South Korea, which has alliances now. Singapore. Sri Lanka. Even Kuwait.

It is important to distinguish the value of the nation-state for self defense purposes from other organizational alliances. There are needs for defensive alliances such as NATO, Japan-U.S., Taiwan-U.S. and economic alliances such as WTO, NAFTA and the EU. These are not nation-states in themselves. They are supra-nation-state entities.

Europeans need to be reminded that the European denial of the right of Israel to self-defense is part of a thousand year long deep European tradition of denying the right of self-defense to Jews.

Jacques Roumani

July 14, 2010

N/A

With pleasure and great interest I read your latest Jerusalem letter (Israel through European eyes) and here are my reactions :

While appreciating the emergence and influence of the "European paradigm", it should be pointed out that it is essentially a Eurocentric phenomenon with ups and downs going back to the 17th century. The European Union is a remarkable achievement but economic and (some) cultural "patriotism" prevails from time to time, along with limits to surrendering sovereign rights (e.g. rejection of the Constitution in 2005 and the absence of a unified foreign policy).

This does not change the lenses through which Europeans may view the world and Israel (as you correctly state), but if people are willing to look beyond wishful thinking and intellectual utopias, they will be able to grasp the uncertain and unfinished business of European Union. Above all, they might acknowledge that the slow and gradual realization of the dream of union could only take place after peace was finally established on the Continent. Obviously the European model could not possibly apply to Israel in terms of its size and highly problematic regional context with its hegemonic paradigms

European lenses are blind and of little use when we look beyond Europe. The Soviet Union did collapse but Russia is resurgent. Soft power may be advocated in the United States but mainly to strengthen America's preeminent role in international affairs. China does not show the slightest interest in Eurpean thought or solutions. India, Pakistan, Iran, Latin America, etc...are a different worlds. Thus, we have not seen a "European domino-effect" thus far and the reason maybe one that is peculiar to European circumstances, such as unprecedented economic wellbeing and a contented way of life, and the accompanying desire to forget about the past (Judt), in light of the horrors of WWI and II - experiences that are hardly shared with the rest of the world.

And how do Europeans contend with competing paradigms, first and foremost Islamism, but also Chinese and other civilisational perspectives, including the Jewish-Hebraic tradition ?

The point is to acknowledge that reality is too complex for one paradigm to become dominant in our age. There are other paradigms, some worse and some better than the European one.

This does not diminish the formidable challenges that Israel faces at this level. As we engage in the battle of words and ideas, I can think of at least three ways that Israel and Israeli intellectuals can help level the playing field, so to speak, by frontally addressing (in conferences, books and articles) the European challenge that you describe:

i) demonstrating the Eurocentric nature of the European paradigm and its inherent weaknesses (e.g. dealing with migrants, Islamic challenges, and demographic decline)

ii) articulating and spreading a Jewish paradigm of social and political order (wasn't it already superior to imperial Rome's ? ), integrated with Zionist ideals and the emerging Israeli modernity as a democratic, scientifically vibrant, value-oriented polity (much as Shalem has been doing). The dialectic of historical Jewish universalism and particularism could be stressed as a productive alternative to illusory internationalism. (Given peace (as in Europe ?), it is not inconceivable for a confederation of Israel, Jordan, and Palestine to emerge ).

iii) engaging more extensively , intellectually and otherwise, with competing (such as the U.S.) or emerging paradigms, such as China and India.

I am sure I am not doing justice to your erudite Jerusalem Letter and compelling argument.(This somewhat hasty response is just an indication of how stimulating I found it to be, as with all your writings).

But I think the European paradigm can be fought frontally and persuasively, and there is room for other paradigms, including our own. After all, I recall Kuhn wrote about paradigm change sometimes happening suddenly and unexpectedly, rather than incrementally.

Ronnie Haffner

July 14, 2010

N/A

A few brief points in response to your letter.

1) I think that Israel's current situation in the public arena, which you described very well, may well be an inevitable outcome of Israel's strength and of the peace process. The gradual bridging of the gap between Israel and the Arabs means that the differences which cannot be bridged in negotiation are being subject to an "endplay" whose fierce tones are in inverse relation to the smallness of the gap. As such, I believe that the current situation may not be necessarily bad, as long as we remember that it’s an inevitable endplay, which in my opinion does not really undermine Israel's right to exist.

2) You mentioned the unification of Europe, but we must not forget that there are contradictory forces at work today which split nations and create new countries - especially in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. I do not see the world today as unanimously moving into unity and eliminating nation states. In some cases it does, in others the inverse is true.

3) One of the recurring themes of Anti-Semitism is the comparison of Israel to Nazism. This is not new and has been demonstrated in the past by several researchers. One of its frequent explanations is the (sometimes sub-conscious) wish of the Germans to disassociate themselves from Nazism, and this is a known psychological reaction that when you want to disassociate yourself from something you associate it with the other side or with your enemy. In this regard, I think your observation is correct, but it only gives part of the picture. To people with this line of thought Israel will always be linked to Nazism for one reason or another. In my opinion the way to deal with it is to look at its root causes and handle this problem without involving Israel directly (preferably through education and dialogue).

4) One of the dominant themes in today's world is Human Rights. While in itself a positive thing, we have seen this issue used cynically against us as a weapon, sometimes in ways that take it to absurdity. For some reason Israel has become the focal point and the test bed of the world in this issue. As bad and as unpleasant as it is to us, we must not lose courage and help the world define this issue in the right context. I see the world in this regard as a child without limits which need to be given limits by a grownup. Let Israel's best philosophers and lawyers take the stage and fight back until we bring this to the right proportions.

Mitchell Lubart

July 14, 2010

N/A

First, thank you for your article.

Second, allow me to restate what I believe your conclusions are in my own words (and forgive me if I botch it):

•The conceptual framework through which much of the world views Israel/Zionism is fixed in such a way as to make a clear response to issues concerning Israel/Zionism not possible .... too may fundamental assumptions of too many people would have to be overturned to enable the world to view Israel/Zionism with clarity. •The conceptual framework ... the fundamental assumptions .... are political/historical/social in nature.

Third, I agree with the first bullet point.

Fourth, the second bullet point is correct and interesting, but nevertheless seems incomplete. It seems to me that the sheer persistence, variety and perversity of anti-Semitism cannot be fully explained with reference to any specific set (or sets) of political/historical/social assumptions and factors ... which is perhaps an awkward way of saying that there is something irrational about the persistence, variety and perversity of anti-Semitism .... which is perhaps a non-religious persons' awkward way of saying there seems to be a bit of a ghost in this machine (Doug might say that Hashem, for reasons of His own, wove anti-Semitism, as an inextricable interwoven strand, into the grand tapestry of History).

Joshua Berman

July 14, 2010

Bar-Ilan University

Very thought provoking, but I'd like to raise two points in contention:1) Nobody seems to object too strenuously to other nation-states making their own decisions about how to sue force to defend themselves. According to your argument, the objection to Israel using force should be equally voiced concerning American or British use of force - but it isn't. Put differently, to solve this conundrum we need an argument that explains the unique antipathy to Israel alone, and I don't see how your argument does that.

2) Your argument looks beneath the surface. But perhaps the answer does lie on the surface - that they actually mean what they say. And what they say is that Israel should be bashed because the Palestinians' lives are controlled by Israel. In various forms, they say, the occupation continues. Now, I personally don't agree with that position, but your essay seeks to understand prevailing winds in world opinion. To be sure, as you point out, we control Gaza to a far less degree than we once did, but we don't get brownie points for that, because we still control their ports, and to a large degree everything else that moves in and out of there. When my kid cuts down on the number of classmates he beats up, the principal doesn't call me to congratulate me on his progress. All he wants to know is why my kid is still hitting other kids. Unfortunately for us, that is how we are perceived. In their terms (not mine) only by fully ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state will the criticism abate. Unfortunately for us, there is no way for us to get to that point in the foreseeable future.

Steve Ekstein

July 14, 2010

N/A

I read your article and I think it has an interesting premise, but I'm not sure I agree with you, for two reasons.

1) Those who normally malign Israel are usually the same ones who are AGAINST globalization - your thesis is that those who see Israel as illegitimate are in favour of the EU, since it goes against the idea of a nation-state. Isn't the EU a step closer to globalization?

2) The focus of Israeli-Palestinian talks since 1993...and even since 1967 (when they weren't talks) ... has been the establishment of a Palestinian state. If the paradigm of European thinkers is that nation-states are bad, why does the focus of efforts always seem to be the establishment of another state. I know there is a minority view that Israel/West Bank/Gaza should become one entity (great idea!), but it rarely seems to me to be a focus. And if these people were advocating it, why not advocate for a united Middle East? I don't think I've really heard of that suggested, outside of a unified Arab currency.

I do not doubt that there is a paradigm shift that has happened, but I think it has more to do with leftists in general seeing all conflicts as strong versus weak (and probably see Israel through a post-colonial lens), rather than nation-states versus conglomerates. Israel is seen as strong and part of the West - the West is strong, the Arabs/Palestinians/Muslims are weak and primitive, thus they are "right", regardless of the facts.

In any case, it was definitely an interesting read...

Paul Socken

July 14, 2010

University of Waterloo

I think your perspective on Israel through Europe's eyes is novel and insightful. It is an important document. However, you overlook the rise of Islamism and Europe's guilt over its colonial past which makes Europe more prone to accepting the Islamists' claims against Israel and against them.

Michael Stein

July 14, 2010

N/A

I enjoyed your letter about Israel's problems as a nation-state in the face of a post-nation-state zeitgeist.I find your argument reasonably compelling, but perhaps overly simplistic.

Surely, the vilification of Israel is a multi-faceted problem, and in addition to the factors you articulate, anti-semitism also contributes to the willingness to criticize and ostracize (in many though certainly not all cases).

Furthermore, realpolitik contributes as well. So long as Israel's enemies are hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, who populate a broad swath of the world, and who control a tremendous amount of natural resources, many will find it convenient to side against us.

I suspect you agree that the phenomenon of Israel's vilification indeed has many aspects and causes, and perhaps you simply needed to focus on the issue at hand, so your letter didn't become a short book.

Thank you again for your efforts to keep us all thinking.

Edward W. Kerson

July 14, 2010

Law Office of Edward W. Kerson

First, yasher koach on a job superbly done.

Second, your piece conjures up memories of a seminar about 40 years ago on early modern European intellectual history at Yale taught by Jack Hexter, in which I was privileged to participate. One of the books we discussed was Kuhn’s Copernican Revolution, a “case study” forming part of the basis of Structure. Although I have reflected on Kuhn’s thesis many times over the years, I never reflected on it in the context of nationalism, Zionism, and the process of “deligitimization” of Israel.

Many thanks for opening my eyes (not to mention conjuring up memories of Hexter’s seminar).

However, it is not correct that Europeans see ALL modern nation states as opposed to human rights. For example – the cases of Tibet, East Timor and Bosnia are all situations in which world opinion believes that the establishment of a separate state is the best way to guarantee the rights of local communities. The same applies in Quebec & Belgium (secession is the best way to guarantee the rights of separate language communities), the former republics of the Soviet Union (break-up of the Union was the best way to protect the rights of smaller states from the Russians), Lebanon (a separate state is the best way to guarantee the rights of Christian minorities) and with regards to the establishment of India & Pakistan (the establishment of separate states was the best way to guarantee Muslim rights). And what about the break-up of the former Czechoslovakia?

What is the difference between support of the nation-state in these other cases and opposition to the nation-state in the case of Israel?

Gerald Levin

July 14, 2010

Johns Hopkins University

Fascinating article. But does not the quarrel with nationalism tend to be focused in Western Europe? In 1945 the United Nations had c.50 members, now nearly 200. Much of this is due to colonial freedom, but also because of the creation of new, independent nations in Europe (Slovakia, Croatia, etc.) and other little states leaving independent countries worldwide (East Timor, Eritrea, Singapore, Bangladesh). How does (or should) Israel and Zionism fit into this apparent worldwide growth of national independence and self-determination?

Jeremiah Unterman

July 14, 2010

Association of Modern Orthodox Day Schools and Yeshiva High Schools

Wow! Great article! I learned a lot, thank you. I pray that you are wrong, but I fear that you are right.Question: And yet, patriotism still exists in England, France, Italy, Spain, etc. These countries still believe in maintaining their own armies, even if against a common enemy. Further, there are signs of a backlash emerging against the Islamists in Europe. Don't these facts mitigate against the paradigm you present?

Shimshon Young

July 14, 2010

N/A

I have some issues with your article, here they are:

1) From a "marketing" point of view, in my humble opinion this article is way too long. Almost no one wants to read a 59-paragraph email. That means people will not finish the article or will skim it and will not get your message.

You could have written the same article in 7-10 (shorter) paragraphs.

I assume that you have other goals besides marketing your message and that a more "scholarly" article like this fits those goals. Fine. But for email distribution I feel your messages should be short, sweet and more frequent.
You can publish the longer stuff in Azure.

2) I disagree that the Left is against Israel because the Left is against nation-states and Israel is a nation-state. In fact, the Left's universalism is against *any* particularlism, whether it be national, ethnic, racial or religious.
The Left's view of Nazism is not a nation-state gone mad but rather ethnic particularlism gone mad. Their solution therefore is not to remove all nation- states but rather to remove all particularlism.

The subsuming of all nation-states into a world government (run by them) is only part of their attack; they simultaneously attack religion (for various reasons), racism and ethnicism. Hence, for example, their drive to destroy nationalism from within in Europe but allowing in large numbers of immigrants from non-European countries. If Germany becomes significantly non-German then the concept of German particularlism will lose any meaning.

I think this is more than a semantic disagreement. It goes right to the heart of the matter.

Since the Jews are the epitome of both religious and national particularlism it is completely rational for the universalistic Left to hate Israel, the Jewish nation. Unlike your theory, this one explains why the Left is so against Jewish statehood and not against statehood for all the other nations that became independent after World War II. And it better explains the Jews- are-Nazis canard -- it is not that the Nazis had a country and guns and so do the Jews now, but rather that the Nazis used their claim to exceptionalism to oppress others and the Left claims the same about the Jews.

An interesting way to test my theory against yours: Since there is often a continuum between the positions of the far-Right and the far-Left, it is likely that if one hates the Jews so will the other, and they will do so *for the same reason*.

It is fairly clear that both (parts of) the far-Right and the far-Left hate Israel.
It is also clear that they do so because of Jewish religious and national particularism or exceptionalism. So the Nazis hated the Jews because Jewish exceptionalism was an affront to German exceptionalism, and the Left hates the Jews/Israel because they are against the notion of exceptionalism in its entirety.

On the other hand, the Nazis were not and the far-Right is not against the Jews because Israel is a nation-state, as you say the Left is.

3) I also partially disagree with the statement that "Jews and non-Jews will simply cease to understand why such a state should exist-and then one day, with awesome speed, the independent Jewish state will be no more." I think this will be read as alarmism. The only thing that can bring about a collapse of Israel is if *Israeli* Jews "simply cease to understand why such a state should exist". Even then, the state of Israel would not fall from within "with awesome speed" as the Soviet Union did. That might cause it to lose a war "with awesome speed" or to slowly disintegrate but not "with awesome speed".

There is no parallel here to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union disintegrated because it was an entity forced upon its citizens, not derived from the will of those citizens. As soon as the power to force the entity upon the citizens ran out the entity collapsed. That can not happen here because the state of Israel is expression of the will of its (Jewish) citizens.

And I believe it is also incorrect that Israel's future existence depends on non-Jews or non-Israeli Jews "understanding why such a state should exist".
In our last email exchange we discussed the relative importance of tangental groups to the Jewish future. Here too, the people that matter most, by far, almost entirely, are the Jews in Israel. Israel was founded when most non-Jews and even many Jews outside Israel had no "understanding why such a state should exist". The majority of the non- Jewish world has been more or less hostile to Israel's existence since before the state was founded and continues to be. That is an annoyance, as would be a further loss of support from Jews abroad, but ultimately Israel exists if Israeli Jews decide to contine to make it exist.

All this assuming that G-d is not at work here, which of course He is.

Herb Rude

July 14, 2010

West End Synagogue

You kind of lost me with the continued mentioning of "paradigms" but this 77 year old Upper West Side Jew thinks that you have made a terrific start towards solving a terrible existing problem,namely, how do we bring young Jews back into the fold.

In '67, I stood a foot taller after the Six Day War. If that happened today, we would go crazy trying to explain why we destroyed the Arab air forces first ( before they bombed Tel Aviv or Jerusalem).

I reread Ben Gurion's speech of November 42 several times --- maybe,that's the answer, we need another David Ben Gurion to explain our position today. You and Daniel Gordis make a good pair, but you don't have the clout of that little guy whom I first saw at the Dan in 1965. My wife and I just stood in awe when he passed us in the lobby.

I am going to forward this on to every friend I can think of.

Fred Moncharsh

July 14, 2010

N/A

Pease explain how then The European Union views the Arab countries who also seek a sovereign nation-state. Why are they not villified
to the same extent as Israel. I do not see them looking to be part of some International body of countries.

Maybe the answer is just a bit more simple. Anti-Jewish sentiment is again raising it's head and is determied to wipe us off the face of the earth
once and for all.

Rob Crutchfield

July 7, 2010

N/A

I am deeply moved to find such penetrating thought, so clearly and reasonably expressed, on this painful and difficult matter. Your essay goes the extra mile to understand the other side's point of view--going beyond the important but insufficient explanation of latent and resurgent anti-Semitism.

I differ with you somewhat, in a way which I hope will be constructive. It seems to me that there is a third paradigm at work--a Paradigm C, if you like; a distinctly American paradigm.

The typical educated American has never heard of Kant, and probably thinks of the EU as merely a free trade zone with romantic pretensions. On the other hand, Americans increasingly question the legitimacy of Israel. I don't think this can be explained either by European influence (extensive though that is in the Academy) or by latent anti-Semitism (which is almost extinct here, Jews being, no less than Irish Catholics, part of the European-American majority).

Americans, like Europeans and Israelis, take Auschwitz as the epitome of political evil. But the characteristically American answer to Auschwitz is neither world government nor nation-states in the European sense. This is a long and complex subject, and I hope, stimulated by your essay, to explore it in some detail; for now I will just sketch my position roughly. Most Americans believe passionately in local and national self-determination, and in general are very far from desiring world government (even in the form of American empire).

Americans believe in sovereign states; but we do not consider a common race, religion, language, ancestry, or history to be the proper basis their unity and autonomy. When we say the word "nation," we usually mean none of those things, but simply a continuous territory under a single sovereign government. What gives such a government legitimacy and a claim on the loyalty of its citizens is the principles and procedures on which it operates, which we sum up in the word "democracy." Democracy, and nothing else, legitimizes a sovereign nation.